


Red Blood, Blue Blood

by Telperien



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bat Family, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Cassandra Cain is Bruce Wayne's Biological Child, Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne's Biological Child, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Jason Todd is Bruce Wayne's Biological Child, Multi, Tim Drake is Bruce Wayne's Biological Child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-04 16:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telperien/pseuds/Telperien
Summary: Jason Todd was living a very ordinary life in Crime Alley before his mother gets sick. Then, suddenly, Jason and Catherine have to grapple with the secret everyone has known since Jason was born with black hair and blue eyes—Willis Todd wasn't his biological father. Bruce Wayne is, and not only is he the richest man in Gotham, he has three other children who may not be glad to have an interloper in their midst.





	1. Catherine and Bruce

Nearly thirteen years ago, after Catherine had left Willis for the fourth or fifth time, her friend Alison convinced her that what she needed was a girl’s night out.

“You’ve been hung up on that loser since, what, junior year?” Alison said after she had unpacked all of Catherine's meager belongings and shoved them away in various corners of her apartment. "You need—you _deserve_ —a night of nothing but fun. Dancing and drinks and absolutely no reminders of the pettiest of petty criminals.”

Catherine frowned at the description, but Alison thought she was being remarkably even-handed in her criticism. She hadn’t mentioned that while Catherine had been a junior in high school, Willis had been the equivalent to a junior in college, or that his treatment of her was more offensive to Catherine’s friends than his pathetic criminal career.

She could have been a lot crueler and more factual, but she wasn’t. And Catherine was offended anyway, so Alison knew it was only a matter of time before Catherine fucked up and went running back to that dumbass.

“He’s not a _petty_ criminal,” Catherine protested. “He knows Johnny Viti now, they did a job together. And Johnny is Carmine Falcone’s nephew.”

Alison rolled her eyes. “Half the city is related to the Falcones, that’s not impressive. And you can stop defending him, _good God,_ Catherine. He could be king of the carjackers, it doesn’t _matter_ , he’d still be a worthless sack of shit who treated you like garbage for years.”

Catherine couldn’t dispute that.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Alison said, mercifully uninterrupted. “You’re going to borrow a dress from Elena, one of the ones she puts on when tuition’s due and she needs bigger tips, and you’re going to get drunk and have fun and stumble home with a handsome stranger. Someone who can actually give you an orgasm.”

Catherine blushed, but she only offered token protests to her friends’ arguments after that. She ended up wearing Elena’s lowest-cut dress, her hair teased and her face painted, and she shifted from foot to foot while they waited for Molly’s new boyfriend to let them through the back of Gotham’s hottest club of the moment.

Years later, Catherine couldn’t remember the club’s name. It must have been something ridiculous. It had been the sort of place the rich and stupid went to forget for a night that they lived in Gotham, or maybe they went to lord it over the sort of people who _did_ need to forget. The waiters and the busboys and the bartenders, even the girls who snuck in like Catherine and her friends.

“Pick a guy, any guy,” Alison said, waving her hands around, gesturing to each of the rich men looking for women just like her, and when Catherine demurred and said _she couldn’t possibly,_ the other girls had put their heads together, eying every man in the club, evaluating each one of them according to a set of standards Catherine didn’t understand.

They still hadn’t decided—though they’d gotten plenty of free drinks from the rejects—by the time Catherine straightened up in her chair and said, decisively, “Him.”

Catherine nearly hadn’t noticed him. He was sitting at a corner table of the crowded club all by himself, a barely-touched drink at his elbow, and he blended almost perfectly into the few shadows the colored lights permitted. If his friend hadn’t gone over to his table to speak to him (and then left in a huff), she might have passed him by.

Which would be a shame. He was really, really good-looking, in the way only movie stars should be.

His friend was a woman, but Catherine wasn’t worried about her being his girlfriend or anything. They looked too alike for them to not be related, and besides, she was flirting hot and heavy with a few Gotham Blades players. He was single. He had to be, the way he was staring down at his glass like it held all the secrets of the universe.

She wondered if he were fresh off a breakup too. Maybe his ex didn’t treat him right either.

Her friends weren’t as compelled by his good looks and apparent introspection. “Are you sure?” Elena asked. When Catherine nodded determinedly, she frowned. “Okay, hon. Just be careful, alright? Because those waiters are circling him like vultures around a carcass. They don’t do that for just _anybody_ here, do they, Moll?”

Molly shrugged. “How on Earth should I know? Tom works here, not me. I can ask him who that guy is, though, if the staff is gossiping.” She squinted at the man. “He looks familiar. He might be an actor…”

And with that, Molly was just as worried as Elena was and just as angry with Alison. Alison was the one who had come up with this incredibly stupid plan. Alison was the one who was going to shove Catherine, probably shocked and horrified at her own behavior, off onto _them_ when everything blew up in her face.

Catherine shook her head. “I’m going in,” she said without waiting for Molly’s report or Elena’s renewed worry.

Alison clasped her shoulder. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” she said. “This is your night, you look fantastic, and you're out for blood. Richie Rich won’t know what hit him. Chase your orgasm.”

“You’re gross,” Catherine said. She grinned, ignoring the fact that only she and Alison were pleased about her decision, and she detached herself from her group of friends and walked straight over to Richie Rich’s table as he played with his glass, watching how the colored lights reflected and refracted in his boredom.

She took a deep breath and said, “Hey.”

He looked up.

Bruce had noticed the young woman looking at him before she walked over to his table, but he hadn’t been able to _see_ her properly, not without meeting her eyes and encouraging her. He didn’t have the energy to play the game, not tonight, but she had come over anyway.

Her eyes were green. Pretty. _She_ was pretty, though her clothes and makeup suited her so little he might have been tricked into thinking otherwise. Her dress was too loose in the bust and too tight in the hips (borrowed, definitely), and her makeup was too dark and dramatic for her features, let alone her soft voice and nervous body language.

She wasn't a trick from one of the enemies he had made abroad, and if she were a fortune-hunter, she was the best he had ever seen in his twenty-two years.

He supposed it was possible that she was a member of the mysterious cult (“the society of assassins,” Ducard had called it) that his trainers seemed to be leading him to, but if Ducard were right and they would come to him, why would they choose to confront him in Gotham when they could just as easily track him down in Paris or Birmingham?

“Hey,” he said back.

She scratched her elbow. “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked, too shy and sweet to be believed. She couldn’t be old enough to be in this club. She was over eighteen, he guessed, but not by much. Nineteen, or possibly twenty.

He glanced over at her friends, who were watching her with expressions ranging from fretful to encouraging. He could still politely rebuff her and send her back to them, but that seemed… unnecessarily cruel. He wasn’t doing anything better, and he was single. A drink couldn’t hurt anybody.

And Jane had told him to stop being such a boring asshole.

“Why don’t I buy you one,” he said. He gestured for her to sit down—she did so, pink-cheeked and proud—and flagged down one of the hovering waiters. Across the room, her friends breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief before they turned back to their own drinks and suitors.

She ordered a rum and coke, and moved by the waiter’s eager stare, Bruce asked for another glass of bourbon.

“Is bourbon any good?” the woman asked after the waiter scampered off, dreaming off tips to come.

Bruce silently slid his still half-full glass over to her. Her cheeks darkened to a deeper pink, but she resolutely picked it up and took a sip—and promptly started gagging.

Bruce laughed. “Not for you?” he asked.

The woman shook her head, laughing too. “No! God, that’s _horrible._ How can you drink that?”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“Why would you want to acquire it?” Bruce had no reply to that, so she smiled and said, “I’m Catherine, by the way. I should have introduced myself before, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be—I didn’t introduce myself either.” He held out his hand. “Bruce.”

They shook hands as their drinks were rushed over to their table. Catherine seemed surprised by how quick the service was, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t seem to recognize him, and Bruce didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not. Mary had reacted badly when he’d explained to her just who Bruce Wayne was.

Thinking of Mary usually ruined his mood, so Bruce stopped that train of thought and asked Catherine, “You can't stomach bourbon, but you don’t have any problem with drinking rum?”

“Rum tastes good,” she declared. He scoffed.

They talked about nothing like that for a while. Their corner of the club was quieter, so they didn’t have to shout over the music to hear each other. It was almost like a date, Bruce thought, but the last time he’d been on a date, he’d been in high school. His training didn’t allow him much free time, and his relationship with Mary—

“What brings you here tonight?” he asked Catherine instead of thinking more about that. “This isn’t your scene. You couldn’t look more uncomfortable if you tried.”

Catherine made a face. “I dumped my boyfriend,” she admitted, “last week. We've been together for three years, on and off, and my friends thought that I needed a night out. What about you? You’re not exactly the life of the party yourself.”

“My cousin dragged me here,” he said, pointing out Jane where she was dancing with a professional hockey player. “I’m in town for Thanksgiving, and she said I had to visit Gotham’s hottest club while I was here. Honestly, I think she needed to get away from my aunt and uncle and their friends for the night, and the only way she could escape was to take me with her.”

“You don’t live in Gotham?”

He was almost offended. It was an understandable assumption, but Bruce considered himself a Gothamite to the bone. “I _do,_ but not right now. I’ve been traveling, the last couple of years, but I decided to come home for the holidays and check in on Alfr—on _Jane_ and her parents. I’m only in town for a few more days.”

Her only reply to that was a quiet “Oh.”

Bruce wondered what had discomforted her. Was it the money? Only someone with money could afford to take off for years and travel the world, so even if she didn’t know he was _Bruce Wayne,_ she knew he was _someone_ with money.

He didn’t think it was that he would be leaving Gotham. They had only known each other for a few hours, and as sweet and innocent as Catherine seemed, he didn’t think she was the sort of woman who fell in love over the course of an evening. He wasn’t that sort of man either.

Bruce did like her, though. He enjoyed talking to her, and he thought that she enjoyed talking to him too. The foundation was there, but anything more…

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

 

Catherine’s friends weren’t impressed by her invitation to dinner from a handsome stranger. “He could be a murderer, for all you know, and you could be his next victim,” Molly told her. Catherine rolled her eyes.

“He’s nice. And it’s just dinner.”

“It’s not _just_ dinner,” Elena said meaningfully.

Catherine told Alison not to expect her back home until late (“I’ll expect you tomorrow,” Alison replied) and headed over to where Bruce was still talking to his cousin and her harem of hockey players. Jane smirked at Catherine when she appeared at Bruce’s elbow.

“ _So_ nice to meet you,” she said. “Bruce has told me absolutely nothing, but I’m always thrilled whenever he gets laid. Better double-wrap it, though, just in case. Eh?”

“That _increases_ the odds of the condoms ripping, Jane,” Bruce said while Catherine went scarlet.

Jane scoffed. “Do you even know how to take a joke?” she asked rhetorically before turning her attention back to Catherine. “He didn’t tell me your name.”

“Oh, uh, I’m Catherine Johnson. And you’re Cousin Jane.”

“That’s the name on my birth certificate,” Jane quipped as they shook hands. They were big on handshakes in this family, weren’t they? It was like every single one of them was running for mayor. “I’d introduce you to these guys, but genuinely, it isn’t worth the effort. Metropolis is going to take these bastards out before the announcer can even finish saying _Blades._ ”

 _“Hey,”_ one of them—was that _Patrick Tolland_ , seriously?—protested good-naturedly.

“You _know_ I’m right, Pat.”

“You here with friends?” another hockey player, this one less famous, asked.

Catherine pointed. “Oh, yeah, over there.”

Jane waved to Alison, Elena, and Molly, who waved back awkwardly once they realized Jane was waving to them. “We’ll keep an eye on them. I’m not woman enough for an entire hockey team, you know. Hey! Maybe if we all play our cards right, everyone can get laid tonight.”

“I’m married,” someone protested.

Jane gave an aggrieved sigh. “Then go home and fuck _her,_ Adam. I’m sick and tired of hearing you going on and _on_ about your stupid marriage. Either go become the devoted husband you obviously want to be, or shut up.”

Bruce coughed pointedly. “We’re going now,” he said.

The November air was cool in the best way when they stepped outside the club, and Catherine took a moment to breathe it in before the cameras began flashing.

She stood there, frozen, for another moment—or maybe it was ten moments. Maybe even a hundred thousand. Bruce said, “ _Shit!_ Let’s go,” and he took hold of her hand, hurrying through the crowd of paparazzi and gawkers, though he moved so smoothly Catherine wondered if anyone else realized he _was_ hurrying.

She hoped she didn’t look ridiculous in the pictures. She _felt_ ridiculous either way, but she hoped she didn’t look it.

“They’ll know where I parked,” he said as he pulled her through a crowd of tourists and then into the alleyway. They heard the photographers run past as they hid in the shadow of a dumpster. “We can walk, though. People don’t usually recognize me out of context.”

“Context,” Catherine repeated, and she remembered the paparazzi shouting _Bruce! Bruce Wayne!_

Everyone in Gotham knew _that_ name. Catherine had been seven years old when the Waynes were killed, three blocks away from her parents’ apartment, and she remembered what Gotham was like in the aftermath. She remembered how the whole city mourned Thomas and Martha Wayne’s deaths, but only the East End—only her dad and uncles and every other man she knew—suffered for it when the police cracked down on the Bowery to no avail. Without direction or purpose.

That wasn't Bruce’s fault, though.

Catherine squeezed Bruce’s hand, still wrapped around her own, and asked, “Where are we going?”

She honestly expected they’d end up in Big Belly Burger or Taco Whiz like she usually did whenever she went out drinking. There weren’t a lot of restaurants open at midnight, even downtown on a Saturday. Instead Bruce took out a cellphone—a _cellphone_ , like it was perfectly normal for someone to have one of those—and then they were sitting down in an empty but obviously high-class restaurant, eating roast duck and drinking wine, while an exhausted but friendly cook and waiter served them.

From the looks on their faces, Bruce tipped them very, _very_ well for their trouble.

Catherine balanced her chin on her hand and—tipsy enough to giggle, tipsy enough to count as _drunk_ —said, “I’d invite you back to my place, but I’m staying with Alison right now. And she’s the kind of roommate who gives live commentary.”

“Then I’ll have to invite you back to my place,” he said. There was a slight slur to his words.

Catherine almost wished she were someone who bragged about her sexual conquests. The penthouse of Wayne Tower was worth talking about. She could write _a homily_ about the library, with its dozens of first editions and ridiculously wide selection otherwise, and she didn’t care that Bruce was laughing at her. It was _magnificent,_ and it didn’t matter what he said, she refused to believe the library in Wayne Manor was better. How could you improve on perfection?

“You can’t,” Bruce said warmly, and he set down his glass of whiskey to kiss her. Catherine had to stand on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck.

 

Bruce didn’t check the expiration date on the box of condoms he had unearthed in the lower drawer of the nightstand. It didn’t occur to him that he should. He was too drunk to consider that the dust was a bad sign, and once he had taken one condom from the box, it was nothing to take a second, then a third.

 

In the morning, Bruce called downstairs to boutique on the tenth floor, and within minutes, a shop girl was at the door with three potential outfits, ready for Catherine’s walk of shame, and a garment bag to carry Elena’s dress.

Catherine felt like an idiot stumbling over her protests that really, he didn’t need to—she was fine going home in the dress she had borrowed from her friend—stride of pride, right? And she must have looked like an idiot too because Bruce had his lips pressed together, visibly struggling not to laugh at her.

"There's going to be paparazzi downstairs," he told her. "You were photographed with me yesterday, and they can all assume you came here last night. And we're right in the middle of downtown, so there will be even more people around. Do you really want to be photographed in yesterday's dress? In broad daylight?"

Catherine snatched the bag out of his hand and went to take a shower. Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom feeling like a completely different woman. Like herself, but more, wearing comfortable— _and_ fashionable _and_ expensive—clothes and her own makeup instead of Alison's.

She thought she looked rather pretty, actually, when she checked herself out in the mirror, and Bruce must have thought so too. He tucked a strand of hair that come free of her braid behind her ear, and he said, "Well then."

It was awkward. _Incredibly_ awkward, and neither of them knew what they were supposed to do next. Catherine had never had sex with anyone except Willis, let alone had a one-night stand, and Bruce's relationships, though generally short-lived, tended to last at least twenty-four hours.

Catherine breathed in and out. She was just going to have to get over it, not that she had much to get over— _She had fucked Bruce Wayne_. That was the kind of story that got told around bar tables for years to come. Alison wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon. Elena and Molly might even be impressed now, if Cousin Jane had talked Cousin Bruce up enough last night.

“Well then,” she said, and she kissed his cheek in farewell.

 

Willis found her at work a week later, and Catherine heard him out as he apologized and promised to do better. She could hear Alison in her head, and Elena and Molly too, telling her that she’d fallen for this before. She heard her mother telling her that some people weren’t fixable, and she heard her father telling her that Willis was scum, unfit to breathe the same air as her, let alone date her.

She remembered how good things were when they were good. She remembered that she had spent three years with Willis for _a reason_.

Willis proved everyone wrong and followed through on his promises this time around. He _proposed_ after they found out Catherine was pregnant. He never would have done that the last time around. Catherine accepted, and she told Molly to shut up when she asked whether she was really sure that this was the best idea—for her, for the baby.

“Are you even sure it’s his?” Alison asked in a hushed voice when Willis was in the bathroom. His friends and Tom were all arguing loudly about sports, so no one could hear her except Catherine and maybe Molly.

Catherine was. She had only fucked Bruce twice over the course of their one night together, but she’d had sex regularly with Willis before and after her one-night stand. _He_ was much less careful (“Much more _careless,_ ” Elena insisted) with birth control than Bruce had been. Bruce had reached his arm out for that box of condoms every single time like it was a reflex.

The baby had to be Willis’s.

She thought that, for the first time in her life, everything was coming up Catherine. She was in love, she was _married_ , and she was expecting her first child. She had a reason to smile privately to herself whenever someone mentioned the Waynes or their company, too, which was often in Gotham, and no one would ever know why except her and the handful of friends she trusted implicitly.

She didn't think she could be happier than she was on the day Jason was born.

Catherine was a little concerned when he was born with a full head of downy black hair and blue eyes, and she saw just how suspicious Willis had become, but luckily, when Jason was two days old, Mrs. Baxter from down the hall came to visit the baby with a gift and well-meaning advise for his mother.

Mrs. Baxter was an old woman who liked to play grandmother to the entire building, and she started in on Jason as soon as she had finished greeting his parents, cooing, “Look at that gorgeous hair! It’s such a shame he’s going to lose it all.”

His mother blinked, and his father looked up from the TV. “He is?” Catherine asked.

“Oh, yes. Babies who are born with hair hardly ever keep it. It will all fall out, and it will grow back some other color. That happened to my daughter Jenny. You met her at the block party, remember? She was born with brown hair, nothing like her father’s or mine, but within a couple of weeks, it had all fallen out. It grew back blond.”

Catherine had met Jenny, who had even lighter blond hair than she did, and she was relieved. Willis gave a single nod and went back to watching the game. They had already heard at the hospital that a baby’s eyes rarely stayed blue for long, so with Mrs. Baxter’s assurances ringing in their ears, they thought no more of Jason’s looks for a good, long time.

They had to leave their apartment soon anyway. Willis had made enemies in the Bowery, so they moved to the Cauldron for a while.

By the time they said their goodbyes, Mrs. Baxter was secretly glad to see them go. She was smarter than Willis and less trusting than Catherine, and she had begun to suspect the truth long before they did. She didn’t want to see the blowout when Willis found out.

Everything was fine for the first few years, sometimes even wonderful. Catherine worked and raised her son, and she tried to keep him away from what the adults did after he was down for the night. Willis went on jobs, and he went out drinking with his buddies. Sometimes he brought work home with him, which was never pleasant, and sometimes he was in jail for a night or two. They moved around a lot as Willis made enemies and lost money, but it was all _manageable_.

Willis gave Jason a pat on the head whenever he stumbled in drunk, which was most nights, and he didn’t go after him like he went after Catherine when he was in one of his moods. If things had gone on like that, Catherine might never have had a word to say against her husband.

Then Willis started to wise up, and Catherine remembered that she had nearly failed statistics back in high school.

Almost every father in the Bowery had some complaint about his children—usually his sons, but sometimes his daughters too—most often about how unmanly they were and how much their mothers coddled them. Willis liked to bitch whenever Jason came home with good grades, for some ungodly reason. Said it wasn’t right that his son spent so much time reading soppy romance novels with Mommy. He didn’t care that _Pride and Prejudice_ was a classic work of literature or that all Jason’s teachers said he was advanced for his age.

He bitched about how Jason wasn’t picking fights in the schoolyard, too, even though they were _eight_ and they had nothing to fight about. Everyone had their lunches from the Wayne Foundation except Tony Bressi’s children (and they knew how to fight better than kids that young should), so there were no arguments over sandwich trading. What was Jason supposed to do, push kids off the swing sets just to get his daily punch in?

Willis had smacked her across the face for saying that. He hated it when Catherine thought she was clever.

Maybe he would have come to accept his son as he was if Jason looked like him. But Jason didn’t. When his hair fell out, it grew back just as black as before, and his eyes remained stubbornly blue.

Jason looked as little like brown-eyed, brown-haired Willis as he looked like green-eyed, blond-haired Catherine. He was tall for his age too, with long limbs that promised he'd get even taller before he was done, and everyone who spoke to Catherine for longer than five seconds commented on how handsome her little boy was—a compliment that _she_ had never received during her childhood. She couldn’t imagine anyone saying that about Willis to poor Mrs. Todd either.

Soon enough, the whole neighborhood knew that Jason wasn’t Willis Todd’s son, not biologically, and maybe if he were a different man that wouldn’t have mattered. Derek down the hall was raising Belle and Emma like they were his own flesh and blood, _he_ didn’t care they were from Shondra’s first marriage, and Frank Lyman had never questioned where his son came from, not even after his girlfriend OD’d and he could have left him to CPS without anybody saying a word. Hannah Wong was raising her husband’s nephew alongside her own children without differentiating them one bit.

But Willis was Willis, and Catherine’s childhood infatuation had soured the first time he had hit Jason and called him a bastard to his face. She’d gone at him with a frying pan for that, but the next day they were back to normal. Like nothing had ever happened. None of them knew the way out. Catherine didn’t know how to leave, Jason had nowhere to go, and Willis…

She had no clue. Maybe he just liked keeping Catherine close at hand and with an easy excuse to smack her around.

It was a relief when Willis got picked up after working a job with Two-Face. Catherine didn’t bother to go to his trial or his sentencing hearing, and she didn’t visit him in Blackgate, though she knew he’d be furious about that when he got out. Except he _didn’t_ get out.

Elena brought over a bottle of wine the evening after Catherine was told that he’d been shanked in the cafeteria, and they toasted to Catherine’s widowhood.

Elena was her last remaining friend now. Molly and Tom had gotten married and moved to Virginia where his uncle had given them jobs at his company, and Alison had gotten killed when Mr. Freeze froze her whole block solid. They’d had their differences over the years, but they needed each other too much to go their separate ways.

“So what’s next?” Elena asked midway through her first glass.

Catherine stared down into her own. “I’m going to get clean. For good.” She had tried a dozen times in the years since her son’s birth, but it never stuck for long. Willis had always come back, and when Willis was there… Catherine wasn’t strong enough, and she knew it.

Elena nodded approvingly. “I would have bought a better bottle of wine if I’d known this was going to be your last,” she said lightly.

Catherine shook her head. Elena’s taste in wine was better than hers, and ever since she had finished her nursing degree and gotten a job at Gotham General, her wine budget was better too. She wouldn’t be mad if this was the last intoxicant she ever took (and she hoped it would be).

They were quiet for a while, then Elena asked, “That’s it? You’re not going to… _you know_?”

Catherine blinked. “No,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Her friend looked at her meaningfully. “Come on, _you know_ , with _Jason_ …”

She looked back at the bedroom door. It was closed. She knew Jason probably had his ear pressed up against the door, but his spying had never surprised Elena, who had a dozen nieces and nephews.

“What about Jason?” she asked.

Elena made an exasperated sound. “Sometimes you can be so stupid, Catherine _,_ ” she said. “His _father._ Are you going to try to get in touch with him now?”

“Oh, _that_.”

Elena rolled her eyes. “Are you considering it?”

Catherine shrugged.

The last thing Elena wanted to do was encourage this, but she had to, didn’t she? Jason was her godson. It was her sacred duty to look out for his interests. “There’s money, and there’s influence,” she said. “Doesn’t Jason deserve a part of that? It’s as much his as it is those other kids’. Denying him that…”

“Where are their mothers?” Catherine asked quietly.

“Huh?”

“Those other kids. Where are their mothers?”

Elena was stricken.

They both followed the tabloids. Ever since Bruce Wayne had returned home to Gotham with his newborn daughter and no mother in sight, they had followed the tabloids. Catherine had lied and told herself that it was just fun for years, but Elena had always known what she was really doing— _Research._

She’d been furious when Bruce returned to Gotham with baby Cassandra, and she’d gotten angrier when it came out that he had another kid, older than Jason, who he hadn’t mentioned once to Catherine during their night together. “Does he make it a habit?” she’d snarled at Alison, who could only shake her head.

Cassandra’s mother was a ghost. She might have emerged fully formed from Bruce’s head for all Elena knew, and while the tabloids gleefully speculated on what misdeeds Bruce got up to during his grand tour, they never dug up anything real. All they could accurately report was that no one had ever seen her or learned her name.

Richard’s mother at least had a name and a face. Mary Lloyd was a pretty woman with curly brown hair and a very white smile, and she worked in a circus as an acrobat with her husband John Grayson. She had never spoken to the press about her relationship with Bruce, but anonymous sources claimed they’d had an actual relationship when he was eighteen or nineteen and she was in her mid-twenties.

Bruce and Mary seemed to get along well enough, but then Richard moved into Wayne Manor, a few years after his father’s return to Gotham. Still, Mary hadn’t said a word to the press, but they’d read reported rumors that she hadn’t wanted to give him up—that Bruce Wayne’s lawyers had _intimidated_ her into agreeing.

Elena might have dismissed that as the typical tabloid lies if it weren’t for what had happened to Janet Caulfield.

The Caulfields weren’t in the same tier as the Waynes and the Kanes, or even the Crownes, but they weren’t paupers or nobodies. Elena had known their name even before Bruce Wayne celebrated his return to Gotham by romancing pretty Janet Caulfield, who had survived her father’s financial mismanagement to become an event planner.

She had gotten pregnant too, _of course_ , a few months after they had started dating, but Bruce hadn’t done what everyone had thought he would do. He hadn’t proposed.

It was one thing to have a child out of wedlock with a circus acrobat or with a nobody, but with a Caulfield? It was shocking enough that no one blamed Janet’s sister for making a scene during the Wayne Gala. No one blamed Bruce’s cousin Jane for physically pulling Flora Caulfield out of the ballroom either, but nobody really cared about that in the first place.

Everyone wanted to know why Bruce Wayne wouldn’t do the right thing before it was too late.

Then it _was_ too late, and the situation only became more shocking. Their son Timothy was a few months old when Gotham learned that not only Bruce and Janet had broken up but that _Bruce_ had full custody of their newborn son. Janet didn’t even have visitation rights.

The tabloids went rabid over that _,_ and Janet Caulfield had fled to Keystone City where she had eventually married another billionaire, this one a self-made software type, with whom she’d quickly had two daughters.

So where were the mothers of Bruce Wayne’s children? Not with their children, evidently.

“None of them live in Gotham,” Elena said weakly.

Even sweet, gullible Catherine snorted at that excuse. “He’s a better man than Willis,” she said confidently, “but I am not losing my son to him. Jason is all I have, and anyway… I don’t want him to end up like _that_ father anymore than I want him to end up like Willis. I’m a bad enough influence on my son without adding _his_ example to the mix.”

Elena shook her head. This whole situation was a mess, but things were going to get easier without Willis. That much was obvious. “Are you ever going to tell him?” she asked.

“Jason can make that choice for himself. I’ll tell him… _everything_ … eventually, when he’s older… and he can decide what he wants to do when he’s eighteen.”

“At least you know he’ll be able to afford college,” Elena said.

Catherine burst into laughter.

From behind the bedroom door, Jason found himself smiling too. His mom didn’t laugh often.

And she didn’t talk about his biological father _ever_. Jason probably wouldn’t have known if not for Willis’s drunken insults and the matter-of-fact way the neighbors talked about it. But they all thought Catherine had gotten high and slept with one of Willis’s cohorts, and that wasn’t true. Elena said he had money and influence and other children, and Catherine said he was a better man than Willis…

Jason was curious, but he didn’t _really_ want to know. He was happier living with his mother, and fathers had never caused him anything but trouble. Maybe he would contact this mysterious bio dad after he turned eighteen, if he was still curious, but that was eight and a half years away.

Catherine and Elena started gossiping about work, so Jason decided they had exhausted their supply of interesting things to say tonight. He went to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You ever have a story idea that won't leave you alone no matter how hard you try? Because this sucker's been on my case since March, and I've spent these past few months deleting my drafts and rewriting everything, deleting and rewriting, over and over again. So now I'm publishing what I have and hoping that encourages me to write the rest. Because I really need to get this out of my system.
> 
> As ever, I love receiving comments and will 99% of the time respond to them. And if I don't respond to them, that's human error, not intentional mean-spiritedness.
> 
>  **Edited 1/19/19**. My main edit to this chapter was changing the POV to a more omniscient narrator, but I also got rid of the seeds to a subplot I'm dropping and added more details about how exactly Jason came to be, Catherine's friends and motivation, Bruce's other baby mamas, and Jason's early resemblance to Bruce.
> 
> Cousin Jane is from Batman #93. It's a strange issue where she shows up at Wayne Manor and dumps her son on Bruce and Dick before taking off to visit her sick husband abroad. I figure she must be close to Bruce (genetically and emotionally) if she feels comfortable dropping her toddler son off unannounced, so they're first cousins.
> 
> The Caulfields are a family mentioned in Batman: Tenses where Bruce attends their post-Christmas Christmas party. That made them seem seemed like the right sort of family for this version of Janet Drake.
> 
> Bruce canonically makes a visit home during the holidays when he's (approximately) twenty-two in Detective Comics #848. Bruce finishes the quip about checking in on Alfred when he's speaking to another socialite in that issue, but here he cuts himself short because he (rightfully) suspects that bringing up his butler/pseudo-father would weird Catherine out right when they're both trying to score.


	2. A Sickness in the Family

Jason was worried.

His mother had looked terrible when she left for work. Honestly, she had looked terrible for _months_. Everyone who’d seen Catherine lately had commented on how pale and tired she looked nowadays, and Jason didn’t see how she could possibly lift tray after tray of drinks when she had nearly screamed her head off the night before when she reached up to set _Tess of the d’Urbervilles_ back on its high shelf.

Jason had wanted her to call in sick and stay home to rest, but he hadn’t dared asked her to—he knew they couldn’t afford it. They could barely afford Catherine’s visit to the oncologist’s last week, and they couldn’t have managed that much without Dr. Thompkins, who always found a way to make it work. They definitely couldn’t afford the treatment Catherine needed, and they had refused to admit what that would mean for them ever since.

They didn’t want to talk about it. Ever since Catherine had come back from the oncologist’s office crying and said, in a soft and shaking voice, “Yeah, Dr. Thompkins was right—it’s cancer,” they had been pretending that she hadn’t ever gone.

Jason felt guilty. He had pushed Catherine to go to the clinic in the first place, and when Dr. Thompkins said it was beyond what she could do there and referred her to an oncologist, he had pushed and prodded her, even throwing a fit when she’d tried to get out of it, until she finally boarded the Urbarail. Maybe if she hadn’t gone…

But that was stupid. She’d be sick either way, but at least now they knew. And as long as they knew what they were facing, they could do something about it.

Jason flexed the toes of his right foot, rubbing them against the paper he had stashed inside his shoe earlier.

He knew Catherine wouldn’t be happy when she got off work and found her son waiting outside the club for her, but Jason didn’t care. He didn’t care how late it was or where he was or how dangerous it would be for the patrons of the Iceberg Lounge to know that Catherine Todd had a son. Catherine couldn’t walk home alone this late, not in this neighborhood. Jason wouldn’t let her. She had fainted two days ago, and if she did that on the streets, a head injury would be the least of her problems.

Jason tried to keep to the shadows, but that was harder in this part of the East End. Whether he was threatening or bribing city officials, it was working, because the Penguin had the only streetlights in the Bowery that worked.

No one was around to see him, anyway. A bouncer had come out back earlier to smoke a cigarette, but he hadn’t paid much attention to Jason. He had given him a brief nod before stubbing out his cigarette and heading back inside, and Jason wrote him off just like he obviously had written Jason off.

He must not have looked like much of a threat to somebody who did the Penguin’s bidding professionally. He could live with that.

He checked his watch again. _11:51_ , it read.

Jason huffed. He wanted to get out of here before something happened. For all he knew, Batman and the Birds of Prey had another raid planned for tonight, and Catherine would get caught in the crossfire.

Another waitress had gotten shot last time that happened—“Friendly fire,” Marisol had described it, so dryly even Catherine had laughed—and if the Wayne Foundation hadn’t picked up the tab, her family would have been _screwed_.

The back door opened again, but it wasn’t his mother in the doorway. It was the same bouncer from before. “Kid!” he called out across the alley. Jason cringed backwards, but there were no shadows to hide him. “Yeah, you! Who else would I mean? Come on in, the boss wants to talk to you.”

“I’m not doing anything!” he shouted back.

“He doesn’t care,” the bouncer said bluntly. “Inside, now.”

Jason could run, but the bouncer would catch up to him and hurt him for running. And then Catherine would get involved, and it would be a whole ugly mess. It was already a mess, but running would make it uglier. Better for him to do as he was told, he knew, and Catherine would tell him the same— _after_ she got done listing all the bad decisions he’d made that led him to this point.

Jason scowled and hurried across the alley.

The bouncer took hold of his shoulder and steered Jason inside, deep through the maze of hallways that protected Oswald Cobblepot from anything but a well-planned and well-executed invasion. Jason memorized their route, but he didn’t know if he would be able to put the information to use.

The bouncer didn’t say a word the whole time, not even to introduce himself or ask for Jason’s name. Jason wondered if he was naturally terse or if he had orders to keep quiet.

The Penguin’s door was indistinguishable from the others they had walked by, but it stood out anyway. Jason had a feeling the second he saw it, a bolt of lightning that coursed through him, and that was when he knew he was in trouble. Whatever reason the Penguin had for wanting to see him, it had to be bad news.

His mom was going to kill him.

“Come in!” the Penguin called out after the bouncer knocked twice on the door, and he grinned toothily when Jason was presented to him with a quiet, “Jason Todd, sir.” He dismissed the bouncer after he had done his duty, and Jason knew the muscle-bound freak had to be waiting outside, guarding his way out.

“Ah, I know who you are, young man. Of course. Catherine and Willis’s son, aren’t you? Rumors aside, I mean,” he added, chuckling to himself, and Jason clenched his fists.

He didn’t say a word. The Penguin hadn’t asked him a question, so he had nothing to say.

The Penguin’s brilliant grin turned into something dark and vicious, but he quickly recovered, resuming his previous jovial attitude. “The quiet type, are you? So is your mother. Darling Catherine! She’s one of my best employees. So hardworking.” His smile faded. “It is such a shame about her recent poor health.”

The Penguin affected an expression of overwrought sorrow. Jason would have to be a complete idiot to believe it, and even if he were a complete idiot… There was a bodyguard hidden behind the door, blocking his way out. How could any person be sincere under those circumstances?

The Penguin sighed. “She looked so pale, so dreadfully pale tonight. Utterly unlike herself. I did suggest that she come lay down on my sofa in here and let Julia take her tables, but she did insist upon working. She said it was nothing she couldn’t work through. She is a proud woman, isn’t she?”

Jason only nodded. The Penguin’s lips thinned.

“I was worried she would faint on the job. Imagine what it would do to my reputation if a waitress fainted on the job!” He sighed. “And I now fear that she will overwork herself and end up in a premature grave. And then what would become of you? You have already lost a father, but to lose a mother as well?”

Jason had to say something now. “Mom’s going to be fine,” he said.

“Perhaps,” the Penguin said, in a doubtful tone of voice, “if she allows herself to accept help. It would mean nothing coming from me. Catherine has worked for me for years, and no one can say a word against her work ethic. Indeed, it would be more foolish of me not to offer my aid. Waitresses so talented don’t come around every day.”

“We don’t need any help,” Jason said mulishly, and he flexed his toes again.

The Penguin’s smile was gone, and he was holding onto his pleasant tone by a thread. “Goodness, your father never refused my help, not once, but you and your mother say that you have no need of me every night. I assure you, I would not demand a single cent in repayment. All I wish is for your mother to be restored to her full health and beauty.”

If Jason believed that, he’d say yes in a second. “We’re fine,” he insisted.

“Young man—”

The office door slammed open. “Catherine,” the Penguin greeted. Catherine was standing in the doorway, breathing heavily. She had run here, they all could tell. “We were just speaking of you, weren’t we, Jason? We were expressing our concern for you during your recent bout of ill health. Jason can’t believe that you would refuse my offers of aid.”

“That’s not true!” Jason spat before he could stop himself.

Catherine’s eyes widened.

Jason didn't need her to tell him that he had made a mistake. The Penguin might have had a silly nickname and a bizarre sense of fashion, but he was a crime boss and a killer. He had always known that, but he could really appreciate it while the Penguin stared him down, knowing that a single shout would bring back the bouncer. Knowing that only a sliver of decency was keeping the Penguin from interrogating Jason the way he interrogated everyone else—with an electric drill.

“Sir,” Catherine said softly, “my shift is over. Shouldn’t I get going?”

The Penguin forced that genial smile back onto his face. “Of course, my dear. Overtime pay might kill us this close to the end of the financial quarter. Off you go, and take your charming young son with you.”

Catherine took Jason by the wrist and dragged him out of the office. He tried to talk to her as she led him through a much shorter and more straightforward route out of the building, but he got no further than “Mom, I’m—” before she cut him off and said, “Not now, Jay! Not— _Jesus Christ_ , Jay.”

He kept silent after that. He watched Catherine gather her things and clock out, and he didn’t say a word until they were outside and Catherine asked, “What the hell were you doing in that office, Jason Peter Todd?”

He was outraged. “I didn’t want to go inside! Some meathead bouncer dragged me in there, I only wanted to wait out back for you.”

Catherine started walking faster. Jason wasn’t that much shorter than she was, but she had heels on and he had to jog to keep up with her. She had reclaimed her grip on his hand, but she didn't let that slow her down as she rushed them through the Bowery. “What were you doing waiting for me?” she asked. “You know how late it is! You know how dangerous it is around here!”

“I was waiting for you _because_ it’s late and it’s dangerous.”

Catherine scoffed.

Jason saw red. “How come I have to go wherever you say, whenever you say, but you can wander the streets freely? You’re just as much at risk as I am, and I need you more than you need me. Shouldn’t I do my part to look after you?”

She grit her teeth. “I am _your mother_. I look after you, you don’t look after me.”

“That’s not true, though, is it?” Jason snapped.

Catherine stopped dead in her tracks.

Jason wished he hadn’t said it the second the words left his mouth. Catherine looked at him like he’d broken her heart, and he’d promised himself—he had sworn—he would never throw her addiction in her face like Willis used to do.

He had understood that Catherine could only be as strong as she was and that Catherine had needed an escape from Willis and his friends and her various jobs and even Jason, and he’d been so grateful that through it all, no matter how bad things got, he’d always known that Catherine loved him.

She’d been clean for two years, and that was still the first javelin he threw?

“I’m sorry,” he said, but Catherine didn’t hear him. She collapsed onto the bench of a bus station, her head in her hands, and she sat there in silence for several minutes. Jason sat down next to her.

“Don’t do this again,” she said after regaining her composure. “Even if Mr. Cobblepot hadn’t gotten involved… I know that you don’t care how much it endangers your life, but that matters to me. I need you, in a way you won’t be able understand until you have children of your own, and I don’t need the stress of worrying about you on top of everything else.”

“You don’t need to worry about me. I can take care of myself.” His big toe twitched, and he added, “And I can take care of you too, Mom, so you don’t have to worry about the cost of the doctors and the medicine either.”

Catherine lifted her head to face him. "What do you mean by that?" she asked.

Jason bent down to pull off his right shoe, and he took hold of the wad of bills inside with a sudden anxiety. It wasn’t too windy out, but it would be just like Gotham for a sudden breeze to come out of nowhere and blow away weeks’ worth of work.

Catherine accepted the bundle with a bewildered look. “Where did you get this money?” she asked. She flipped through the bills quickly, mentally adding up the twenties, tens, and even singles until she got the total.

She swore underneath her breath.

“I earned it,” he said proudly.

“How?”

Catherine didn't sound happy. He had thought she would sound happy.

Jason turned his head rather than look her in the eyes. He shrugged. “Just… _around_ ,” he said quietly. “I did some work for some guys in the neighborhood, and they paid me for it. It’s not important how I got it, what’s important is that you don’t need to worry. I’m going to take care of you, Mom.”

There were a lot of ways Catherine could respond to that. She picked one at random.

Catherine threw the bundle of bills inside her purse. “This isn’t happening,” she said firmly. “I’m not letting you turn into Willis. No way. This is how it starts, and I’m putting a stop to it right here and now.”

 _What are we going to do, then?_ Jason wanted to demand. The Penguin was already curious about Catherine’s health. Jason bet he would have the truth sooner rather than later, and then she’d be fired. He couldn’t want a dying woman working for him, and if they didn’t have any money…

Catherine would die. And in the months before her death… Jason knew what people resorted to when they were desperate. He had seen it all the time, living in the Bowery. People did awful things to themselves when they needed to escape the pain. And Catherine had already gone there once before.

Jason exhaled and asked, “You’re not going to go back to _using_ , are you?”

Catherine pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “Of course not. I promised you that I was going to stay clean, and I’m going to keep my promise. Nothing could… I’m not going to put you through that again, okay? Things are different now. There are options we didn’t have before. You’re going to be safe from now on.”

“Options,” he repeated.

She breathed in and out. “Options,” she confirmed. Her voice was firm when she said, “I’m going to go over to Mrs. Walker’s tomorrow and ask her for the name of the lawyer she hired to get custody of her grandkids. I don’t know how else to do it, and even if they can’t help me, they’ll have to know who can.”

“Help you do what?”

“Contact your father.”

“My father,” he repeated. He knew she didn’t mean Willis. Willis had been dead for two years, and ever since then—with the exception of their last name and the Penguin’s jibes—they’d been living like he had never existed.

He knew who she meant, even though they had never spoken of the mystery man. The only time Jason had ever heard his mother mention his biological father was when he overheard her speaking to his aunt Elena just after Willis’s death. She hadn’t acknowledged the rumors about her son’s paternity otherwise, even though every gossipmonger on the block had their own theory.

He’d thought they’d die pretending that Willis Todd had contributed his DNA to Jason’s existence.

His mother nodded, and Jason asked, “You _definitely_ know who he is?”

Catherine made a face. She didn’t look _too_ offended, but she didn’t seem amused either. “I don’t know what you think I was getting up to at nineteen, but I promise, you have only ever been two potential fathers. Willis and… well, _him_.”

 _Him_ , Jason thought resentfully. She wouldn’t even say his name, and she expected Jason to be hunky-dory with whatever she had planned. Did she expect him to go and _move in_ with this man? Because Jason would refused to go any way other than kicking and screaming.

“He sounds great,” he said sarcastically.

Catherine sighed. She had expected that her son would be difficult about this. Her baby could be so prickly sometimes, and he had rarely found it in him to like anyone. He hung out with the neighborhood kids because they were there, he was lonely, and he might as well, but he had no close friends. He liked even fewer adults—Catherine and Elena, definitely, and maybe his teacher too.

And he was suspicious, too. Everyone in Gotham was, but Jason was better at it than most.

“He’s not a bad person, Jason,” she promised him. _A bad example, maybe, but not a bad person._ “He was very kind to me when we met, and he’s… You have half-siblings. Two brothers and a sister. That might be nice, won’t it? They seem like good kids, and he seems like a good father to them.”

His outrage grew. “Do you _talk_ to him?”

That was a level of betrayal Jason hadn’t been prepared for. It had been one thing for Catherine to keep his paternity a secret, but it was another if she had spent the last twelve years talking to his biological father behind his back.

“Oh, no. I have been… following him through the tabloids.” She grimaced. “Only for the last couple of years. I genuinely did think Willis was your biological father, baby. I wouldn’t have intentionally lied about that. And by the time I figured it out… It was just idle curiosity that got me to read those articles.”

“The tabloids,” Jason said. That was a twist. “Is he famous?” He tried to remember if Catherine had ever mentioned meeting a celebrity before. Once, she’d started telling him about the time she and her friends had run into the Gotham Blades in a club, but Elena had cut her off, laughing, and said, “Jay doesn’t need to hear that story.”

Catherine thought about that for a while. “In a way,” she said eventually.

“Who is he, then?” he demanded.

“Bruce Wayne.”

That wasn’t a name Jason had expected to hear. Mostly because he _knew_ it. Bruce Wayne was the hero of the East End, the financer of every charitable organization and initiative. He was always in the news for _something_ —usually because he was drunk and flirting with supermodels, sometimes because he was campaigning for a politician or a cause.

 _Sometimes_ because he had three children by three different mothers. No one except Catherine and Elena (and now Jason) knew that he was really four for four.

Jason had a thousand and one questions—all of which boiled down to _Bruce Wayne, really?_ —but Catherine wasn’t willing to answer any of them in public while they were sitting in a graffiti-strewn bus stop.

She hurried him home and told him to go to bed— _now,_ Jason—and in the morning, he got maybe a handful of answers before she decided that was enough. She dragged him to the earliest mass Father Mark had scheduled, and they must have looked like wrecks because Father Mark didn't tell them off for missing every Sunday since Christmas. He only said, “It’s good to have you back.”

The morning after that, Catherine hired a lawyer.

 

Jason knew that, in his own unique way, he had been spoiled. Ever since Willis had gone to Blackgate and Catherine had gotten clean, she had treated him almost like an equal. Like a partner. Jason had been his mother’s caregiver for years before she didn’t need one anymore, and she had acknowledged that by allowing him an equal say in the decisions that affected their lives.

She said it was good practice for adulthood. “This way you’ll know what to do when the time comes,” she had said, but apparently he didn't need any practice for _this_ aspect of grown-up life.

Jason found out what was happening from the bits and pieces Catherine mentioned to him in passing as they went about their days, in the brief moments their lives intersected between school and work. She had hired a lawyer, and her lawyer had contacted Mr. Wayne’s lawyers (of which there were many). They had gone to Mr. Wayne, and he had confirmed that, yes, he had met—and had sex with—Catherine Todd, nee Johnson, when she said he had.

The next step was the DNA test.

His mother took him out of school for that, which he considered a waste of time. He bitched about it all the way from the Bowery to Burnside, ignoring how Catherine rubbed at her forehead and gave tight-lipped smiles to the other passengers when they glanced over at the insolent boy and his mother.

“The lab is only open from nine to five, Jay,” she said after the Urbarail had taken them six stops closer to civilization. “You were going to have miss at least some school to get the test done, so we might as well make a day of it. We could get ice cream and walk around Gotham U afterwards…”

He crossed his arms. “We don’t need the stupid test in the first place.”

Catherine refused to show a single sign of irritation, which only made Jason more irritated. “I disagree,” she said mildly.

Jason kicked his legs out and ignored the offended expression on the old lady across the aisle. Catherine could disagree all she wanted, but he had proven to Catherine that he could take care of her. It wasn’t a great plan, maybe, but it would _work_. And he wouldn’t need a new father to do it.

The old one had been bad enough.

But Catherine insisted that this was the way they were doing things, and Jason was eleven years old. He was learning that there wasn’t much he could do when his mother said “Jump” except ask “How high?”

“Jason,” Catherine said when they were standing on the doorstep of the lab. She looked around awkwardly and wished she were anywhere else. “Maybe it would be best not to mention—uh, _whose_ DNA we’re testing. Besides yours, I mean. I’m sure the doctors know, they have to, but… We don’t anyone who isn’t a doctor to overhear, alright? And I don’t know what kind of privacy agreements these people have signed.”

Jason looked at her doubtfully. “You think people will care?”

She snorted. “I know they will. Come on, _you know_ who he is.”

A light bulb lit up over his head. “And you-know-who doesn’t want it getting out?” he asked, trying to stamp down on the excitement coloring his voice.

Catherine didn’t pick up on that. She only frowned thoughtfully. “It could be bad publicity. I’m sure he’ll have his PR people on it once the test results come in, but right now, if it gets to the papers in the wrong way… They could say very bad things about him. About us.”

Jason swore that he wouldn’t so much as think his name while they were inside the lab (“There’s no need to be so dramatic, weirdo,” Catherine said fondly), and he entered the drab building with a skip in his step.

He didn’t say a word of complaint when the lab tech rubbed at the inside of his cheek with a cotton swab while Catherine asked her a million questions. It felt weird and unpleasant, and the lab tech smelled like bleach, but none of that mattered. Jason had a plan now, and his was a way, way better plan than Catherine’s.

It was something of a downer that he’d need to wait at least a week before enacting his plan, but the lab tech was pretty confident about that.

After Catherine had gotten swabbed too, she asked, “Should we wait around until you’re done?”

The lab tech snorted like she’d told a joke. “You’d be here a while, then,” she said. Catherine only stared blankly at her, so she added, “Normal DNA tests take days _at the least_ —accurate ones, anyway—so I wouldn’t wait around even if it was just that, but it’s not just that. We’ve also got to run tests for genetic engineering, alien DNA, metahuman mutations… etcetera, etcetera.”

Catherine sighed. “You need to make sure we are who we say we are.”

Jason scowled. “Was that in doubt?” he asked.

The lab tech shrugged. “You never know, these days,” she said. “Clayface walks among us, and he isn’t the only one.”

Their return to the Bowery after that was anticlimactic. All these tests took more time than Jason had anticipated, and not even Mr. Wayne’s money could make them go faster. Catherine mumbled under her breath about stress and waiting, or the stress of waiting, and Jason cursed every second Catherine spent slowly dying right next to him.

 

The results came in on Thursday.

Catherine was already home when Jason got back to their apartment after school, sitting hunched over on the futon, and on the rickety old coffee table in front of her there was a small stack of papers and a coffee cup from Sundollar, which was so ridiculously expensive they never, ever got anything to drink from there.

She didn’t look up when Jason came inside. She welcomed him home with a quiet, “Hey, baby.”

Jason set his backpack down on the ground and kicked off his shoes. “Hey, Mom.”

Catherine held up the papers, but Jason couldn’t read anything from them before she threw them back onto the table. “Positive. Obviously.” She pressed her lips together. “The doctors and the lawyers have done their jobs, I guess.”

“That’s…” Jason trailed off. _That’s good_ was a lie. _That’s unfortunate_ was rude.

Catherine rubbed at her mouth. “Your father wants to meet you. Soon, he said. Would you mind if we went out to lunch with him on Saturday?”

She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “You already said yes,” Jason said accusingly.

Catherine pressed her lips together. “What was I supposed to say, Jason?” she asked him. “It’s not like it was a ridiculous request, and he—It’s just better to go along with what he wants right now. For your sake. Just in case.”

Catherine was lucky Jason had a plan of his own, or he’d be yelling at her so loudly they would hear him in Chinatown.

“I don’t see why he has to meet me,” he grumbled. “He could have just paid you off through the lawyers, and we all could go back to our regular lives.” That had been his Plan A, and Jason had been pretty hopeful about it until Mr. Wayne went and screwed it up by asking to meet him.

What was he expecting to get out of this lunch meeting, exactly? Because whatever it was, Jason definitely wasn’t going to give it to him.

She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think this is a money issue, kiddo. I don’t know what kind of money issues a man that rich can have, anyway.”

Jason didn’t know either. “Did someone tell him about the cancer?” he asked her. It could make things more complicated if Mr. Wayne already knew. Or if he didn’t.

Catherine shrugged, but she didn’t convince him with her show of nonchalance. “Our lawyer might have said something to his lawyers. I _did_ tell Sofia why I wanted to get in touch with him after so long, so… I think she must have said something to them about it. He’s probably heard.”

There was an awkward pause, then Jason asked, “Where are we going for lunch?”

Catherine wrinkled her nose. “Some place called Helix,” she said uncertainly. “Sofia says that it’s _inside_ Wayne Tower. I had no idea they even had restaurants in there.”

But of course it was.

Jason was surprised that Catherine hadn’t realized what was going on. She had been the one who’d explained everything to him when the last Katherine Daye novel left him confused.

It had been a pretty standard murder mystery (Daye was no Dotson), but it had been entertaining enough and Catherine had gotten it from the second-hand bookstore pretty soon after it was published. She had given it to Jason after she was done reading it, and he’d managed to finish the whole thing in a Saturday.

He hadn’t been surprised by any of the plot twists. Even at the age of eleven, he knew to suspect the polite and wealthy businessman the victim had dumped just a couple months before the murder. The only thing that had confused him was why the heroine, the victim’s best friend, had made such a fuss over where she had her confrontation with the murderer, but Catherine had known exactly why when he asked her.

“She wanted to be in control of the situation,” Catherine had said, ruffling his hair, “and that means she had to be in control of the space. She needed to know how the room is set up and where everything is and how she could get in and out.”

That had made sense to Jason. He understood all too well the need to control a situation, especially when that power was so frequently out of reach. He didn’t know whether his newfound father needed to control situations in the same way, but Jason could guess that he _expected_ that he would be able to. Rich and powerful people were like that.

And now he expected control over _this_ situation too, so Jason and Catherine had to eat lunch in his family’s stupid tower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Bruce! Lunch! Skyscrapers!
> 
>  **Edited 1/29/2019.** I changed the POV to an omniscient narrator, and I expanded a couple of scenes. I also deleted references to Catherine's second job. While it is very likely that she'd have one, it complicates a later plot point. So we'll say the diner where she worked got shut down for money laundering.
> 
> Katherine Daye and Dotson aren't real writers, they're both characters from the comics. Kaye Daye was a friend of Bruce's for a while back in the 60s and 70s, who I found by searching "category:writers" on the DC Wiki, and Barbara says that Dotson is one of her favorite writers in Batman Chronicles #9.


	3. The Skyscraper

Catherine spent thirty minutes going through her meager closet before she finally admitted defeat. She held up her funeral dress against her torso and asked her son, “What do you think, baby?”

He scoffed. “Well, if I have to dress like I’m going to Mrs. Anderson’s funeral, then so do you.”

Jason _hated_ this shirt and these pants. Catherine had bought everything new but as cheap as could be a couple months ago for Mrs. Anderson’s funeral, so the outfit still fit, but it was _awful._ It _itched_ , and Jason had grown two inches since early January, which made it an uncomfortable fit. And Mrs. Walker had told Catherine that the colors washed him out.

 _“Jason,”_ she said warningly. “I asked you to keep an open mind. You don’t know anything about your father yet.”

“I know he’s a drunken party boy who was born into the richest family in Gotham and acts like it,” Jason said, counting off on his fingers. “I know he had a one-night stand with you and skipped town before he could face the consequences. I know he has three other children from those exact same circumstances, which suggests a pattern. _And_ I know he called up your lawyer and demanded this meeting without giving anything up in exchange." He brandished his hand with its four raised fingers at her. "I know four things about him!”

Catherine tutted. “You don’t _know_ any of those things. His reputation in the tabloids doesn’t resemble the man I met at all, and your siblings aren’t from one-night stands. He dated Timothy’s mother for months, if I remember correctly, and I’m sure he had serious relationships with Richard and Cassandra’s mothers too.” She unzipped the back of the dress. “And if I don’t hate him for not magically _guessing_ that I was pregnant or for wanting to meet you, then I don’t see how you can. Now get out of here before you get an unpleasant lesson in anatomy.”

Jason stormed out of the room.

Catherine sighed, and she hoped she was right. She _needed_ this to work out for Jason, or she didn’t know what she would else she could do. Elena was an option, but her friend enjoyed her single, childless life too much to submit gracefully to a life with a readymade eleven-year-old son. And foster care in Gotham was _never_ an option.

Maybe she could convince Bruce to send Jason to boarding school if he didn’t want their son. No one could possibly make the connection if Jason kept the name Todd. Catherine couldn’t cause him any trouble once she was dead, and Jason very obviously didn’t want to cause any himself. She’d bring it up if the meeting went south.

She emerged from the bedroom and said, “Zip me up, and let’s go. We’ve got a reservation to keep.”

 

The Gotham Transit Authority was notoriously corrupt. The mobs had each had their turn controlling the Urbarail system that snaked through the city, but the mobs had lost their sway over Gotham after the Columbus Day Massacre, and now it was the Penguin who controlled transportation in Gotham.

He was terrible at it. At least Sal Maroni had kept the trains well-maintained and on time.

The Todds had left the apartment two hours before their meeting with Mr. Wayne, and it was a mystery whether they’d make it in time. Catherine cursed under her breath and asked no one in particular, “What’s the point of even having an Urbarail system if it never fucking goes anywhere?”

A young woman sitting nearby overheard and laughed. She had her smartphone in her hand, and she said, “Twitter is saying there’s a guy threatening to jump onto the tracks at Coventry.”

“Selfish bastard,” Catherine said. She didn’t notice the irony.

The train started moving again soon enough, which probably meant they’d calmed the guy down, and Catherine breathed a sigh of relief.

The young woman got off at Burnside, and the regular Saturday morning commuters had no interest in a woman and her adolescent son. One man did eye Catherine for a long time—even licked his lips once, the fucking pervert—but he didn’t dare try anything with Jason scowling right at him.

Jason tried to distract himself with the other commuters, but none of them were doing anything interesting enough to hold his attention for long. Catherine wasn’t even bothering. She always carried a book—or two—in her purse, but she kept her hands folded over her purse as she stared forward blankly.

The PA system crackled, and the disturbingly cheerful recording played, _“The train is now approaching Wayne Tower.”_

They stood up. Jason grabbed onto his mother’s elbow as they fought their way through the throng of people, past the pervert and everyone else, until they spilled out onto the platform.

“I hate trains,” Catherine muttered. She took Jason’s hand in hers, even though he was eleven and too old for that, before striding forward, up the stairs and out into the weak Gotham sunshine.

Jason had never been so far southwest before. He had certainly never been to the Diamond District. His entire life up until this point had been contained to the East End, and he wanted to turn around and run back down the stairs—to climb onto any train that would take him _home_ —before he was exiled forever.

“Come on,” Catherine said, softening a little for her son. “The sooner we get this over with…”

“—the sooner _you die,_ ” he cut her off, viciously.

Catherine picked up her pace.

Jason immediately felt guilty for saying it, but he couldn’t help himself. It was getting to be too much to keep his emotions bottled up like this.

 

Wayne Tower wasn’t the tallest building in the Diamond District, but it didn’t need to be. It was _imposing._ It dominated the skyline, a thousand feet tall, made from grey stone, with jutting decorations and twelve grim gargoyles to mark each of the twelve entrances into Gotham. A plaque outside said _“Wayne Tower was completed in 1888 at the initiative of Alan Wayne, based on the designs of architect Cyrus Pinkney. Pinkney dedicated the building to the memory of his friend and Alan’s father Solomon Wayne.”_

“It’s ugly,” Jason said.

“It’s a Pinkney,” Catherine replied. Jason was neither the first nor the last Gothamite to question the artistic value of Cyrus Pinkney’s work, but his omnipresence in Gotham’s architecture was something they all had to accept. Solomon Wayne had loved the man, so he and his son had financed too many of his buildings.

Inside they had to force their way through yet another crowd, this one comprised on ambling tourists who didn’t care that Catherine and Jason had things to do, not when they were visiting the most famous building in Gotham.

The receptionists were talking among themselves when they reached the welcome desk, but one jumped to attention when she realized she had work to do. “Hello, and welcome to Wayne Tower!” she said with a smile too cheerful for a Saturday morning shift. “How can I help you?”

“We have a reservation at Helix,” Catherine blurted out. “It’s a restaurant,” she explained, then blushed. All three of them knew that the receptionist had to know what Helix was. She worked here.

The receptionist’s smile grew more sincere than bright. “Helix is on the thirty-ninth floor, ma’am.”

“So we just… take an elevator?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Catherine’s eyes met Jason’s, and they both shrugged. Jason had expected it to be more complicated than that too, but maybe he shouldn’t have. Maybe _they_ shouldn’t have.

Bruce Wayne wanted to keep this as quiet as he could. Hadn’t Catherine admitted as much? Obviously, Brucie didn’t want news of his Crime Alley bastard to leak just because they had to go through six separate checkpoints and play fetch with the sniffer dogs.

“Thank you,” Catherine said, and she started towards the elevator. Jason hurried after her, half afraid she would forget him in her haste to get this over with.

The elevator could have been an apartment on its own, it was so big and lavish. There were tourists inside that too, and a few Wayne Enterprises employees, so they couldn’t talk. Jason clung to his mother’s side like a child half his age, and she smoothed his hair down.

“Such a mess,” she murmured as they lost and gained passengers each floor. Jason hoped she meant his hair.

They reached the thirty-ninth floor too quickly and too slowly all at once. Jason’s nerves were on fire, and for a moment he pretended that this was all a horrible dream and in reality, his mother was perfectly healthy, he didn’t need a father and he never would, he wasn’t walking towards the snootiest-looking waiter he had ever seen in his life.

“I don’t know what name the reservation’s under,” Catherine said bluntly when they were within arm’s reach of the lectern. The waiter raised an eyebrow, but before he could reply, she continued, “My name is Catherine Todd, this is my son Jason Todd, and I was told that our reservation was for eleven o’clock.”

The waiter’s mouth dropped open. “Ms. Todd!” he exclaimed, shocked and nervous. Suddenly he was all smiles, his head almost bowed in an exaggerated gesture of respect. “Of course. I’ll take you to your table right away—Mr. Wayne is already seated—Please follow me.”

Jason and Catherine met eyes again. _Mr. Wayne is already seated,_ they silently echoed, and they followed the waiter down the aisles of the restaurant, past diners who were dressed far better than they were and who knew it. Even the waiters were better dressed than Jason, and he didn’t know now whether this waiter was _actually_ a waiter. Catherine had worked in places fancy enough to have a maître d′ before, but Jason had to wonder whether this restaurant was _too_ fancy for a maître d′. Maybe they had something better.

The maître d′ led them to the back of the restaurant, deep into a winding maze of low walls and overgrown plants, until they reached a window the length of their apartment wall—and their dining companion, who was staring out the window down at the people below.

“Ms. Todd and Mr. Todd, sir,” the maître d′ announced breathlessly.

He looked up.

It was almost like déjà vu to have Catherine Johnson standing nervously over him like this, but of course it wasn’t a perfect recreation of their first meeting. This time they were in a restaurant during the day, not a neon-lit night club, and they were twelve years older. Catherine showed it more than he did, Bruce admitted honestly, and he had spent those twelve years in street brawls for the most part. She looked frail and skinny, and she had only gotten more anxious in the years since.

And then there was Jason.

Bruce had known Dick and Cassandra and Tim from the moment of their births. It had been emotional to lay his eyes upon his child for the first time, every single time, but there had been other factors besides his pride and his joy—there had been his complicated relationships with their mothers, the instability of his lifestyle, and the fear. Mostly, the fear.

He had known as soon as he had seen them that he couldn’t be a good enough father to Dick because he was too young and because there was something he needed more than parenting a child who already had two parents, that he couldn’t protect Cassandra from the murderers that wanted her or the hurt that would follow when she learned the truth, and that he couldn’t do the right thing for Tim because there was no right thing.

It was different to lay his eyes upon a half-grown person and not fear the future, only regret the past. Had he been there on the day Jason had been born, what would he have thought?

“Thank you, Mr. Allen,” Bruce said as he rose to his feet, and the maître d′ actually _bowed_. Bruce was vaguely alarmed, but he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he’d have a quiet word with the manager when Ms. Jackson had a moment to spare. He didn’t encourage obsequiousness among his employees, and Mr. Allen wasn’t even his employee.

“Your server will be with you shortly,” Mr. Allen said before hurrying back to his station.

Which left the three of them alone.

“Catherine,” Bruce Wayne said, shaking Catherine’s hand, and he pulled out a chair for her like something out of a movie. “You look well,” he added as she sat, not half as elegant or effortless as he had been.

“So do you,” she said quietly.

That left Jason standing opposite their host.

Jason was one of the biggest boys in his class, but he had to be a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than Bruce Wayne, who filled the narrow aisle like he was born to do just that. Other than that, though, it was a bit like looking into a funhouse mirror where instead of showing Jason what it would look like if he were stretched fatter or thinner, it showed him the future. Jason tried to catalogue the differences between them—his nose was thinner, his chin was more pointed, his eyes were a greener shade of blue—but mostly he saw similarities.

He really did look nothing like Willis Todd. He’d half-suspected that was just a fantasy he’d had—or that Willis’d had.

“Jason, it’s good to meet you,” the man said gravely, and he held out his hand. Jason didn’t know whether he felt more like a candidate for mayor or a child playing dress-up, but he was relieved when the handshake ended until Mr. Wayne pulled out the chair in between Catherine and the window.

Jason wasn’t sure whether that was the better of his two options. Either he sat next to his newly discovered father, or he sat across from him. Not like he _had_ options. Mr. Wayne had pulled out that chair for him, so he was going to sit there.

Mr. Wayne returned to his seat right as their waitress came over. She was younger than Catherine and terribly pretty, and she leaned down too far when she handed Mr. Wayne his menu.

Jason snorted without meaning to.

Mr. Wayne pressed his lips together, his shoulders shaking, while the waitress gawked at Jason, and Catherine reached over to pat his back too firmly. “A cold,” she said so firmly no one dared contradict her. Mr. Wayne’s shoulders shook harder.

“Can I get you any appetizers or anything to drink?” the waitress—Eileen—asked with pink cheeks.

Catherine glanced over the menu quickly, her eyes narrowed. “Water, thank you,” she said, and she shot Mr. Wayne a look that quelled any lingering smile.

"Sparkling or still?" Eileen asked.

"Still," Catherine answered. Jason had no idea what they were talking about.

“For me as well,” Mr. Wayne said.

Jason checked twice to make sure there was no soda on the menu before he asked for water too. What kind of restaurant didn’t have soda? Did no one under thirty ever eat here?

Eileen looked confused, but she went to get them their waters.

“There are no prices on my menu,” Catherine said as soon as she was out of earshot.

A quick scan revealed there weren’t any on Jason’s either. “It’s a blind menu,” Mr. Wayne explained. “You should try the duck. It’s very good here, and you _did_ enjoy it when we went to Republique.”

Catherine clenched her teeth. She couldn’t believe Bruce would elude to _that night_ in front of Jason like that. “I don’t feel comfortable ordering off a menu when I don’t know the prices,” she said carefully, sounding out each syllable slowly and precisely.

Jason thought that Mr. Wayne should’ve known better than to try and charm Catherine into a better mood, but he didn’t. He was smiling as he said, “There isn’t any need for you to feel uncomfortable, Catherine. I could buy everything on this menu twice over, and I wouldn’t even notice.”

“Yes, I have noticed that.”

Mr. Wayne dropped his head and frowned, drumming his fingers on the table. Eileen brought them their waters, and they placed their orders: Mr. Wayne asked for something in French, Mom got the bucatini (staring Mr. Wayne down as she did so), and Jason got the cavatelli. He didn’t know what it was, but it came off the pasta menu.

Jason had to wonder what Eileen thought of them sitting there in uncomfortable silence. She didn’t say anything that didn’t come off her script, and she didn’t try to flirt with Mr. Wayne again.

“You’re in sixth grade,” Mr. Wayne said when Eileen was gone with their orders.

Jason looked at Catherine, who nodded, before answering. “Yeah,” he said.

“Are you enjoying it?”

“Yeah.”

“Jason loves school,” Catherine said. She was bragging, but she wouldn’t look at Mr. Wayne. “He has excellent grades. His teachers never complain about him or his work, and he never tries to get out of going.”

Mr. Wayne nodded. “That’s good. What’s your favorite subject?”

“English.”

“He likes to read,” Mr. Wayne said. “I wonder where he got that from.” He smiled at Catherine, and she smiled back thinly.

Jason turned to stare out the window.

“It’s just the two of you?” Mr. Wayne asked, but it didn’t sound much like a question.

“Since Willis died, yes.”

“Willis was your husband.”

“Yes. I did ask my lawyer to say—it was a genuine mistake. Willis and I did believe that Jason was his child, uh, _biologically_ , until—well—” Catherine laughed a little. “He didn’t turn out looking much like either of us.”

“No,” Mr. Wayne said warmly, “he looks like a Wayne.”

Jason redoubled his stare.

Catherine and Mr. Wayne talked while they waited for the food. Jason supposed they were _catching up_ , but that was absurd. He got the feeling that they had barely known each other in the first place. All Mr. Wayne knew about Catherine was that she liked to read, and she asked after his cousin Jane twice, which led to Mr. Wayne telling her, twice, that Jane was married with a son a few years younger than Jason—Junior was his son Tim’s age, in fact.

Jason didn’t entirely succeed in hiding his expression from Mr. Wayne when he heard that one. Wasn’t it bad enough that he had rich bitch siblings without adding rich bitch _cousins_ to the mix?

Mostly they talked about Jason. It was weird sitting in between two people who were talking about him without saying a word, but Jason didn’t want to encourage them. Mr. Wayne asked countless questions about Jason’s school and his grades, what his hobbies and interests were, his favorite foods and colors and sports teams—and Catherine answered them all.

Jason had no idea why they were bothering. Mr. Wayne didn’t really care, and Catherine had to know that.

Their food arrived in the middle of Catherine’s retelling of the time she had taken Jason to an ice cream parlor to celebrate one straight-A report card or another and how it had been there that he had discovered Neapolitan ice cream. (She tactfully left out that she had been high at the time and that Willis had been furious at her for wasting money.) Mr. Wayne didn’t ask her to pick it back up after the waiters left. He could probably guess the ending.

Jason took a bite of the pasta and grimaced. The sauce was too much, and the mushrooms looked and tasted nothing like the mushrooms he was familiar with. Even the pasta was a little weird, though it might not have been too bad in another dish. He tried a few more bites before he decided he couldn’t take it anymore.

He tugged on Catherine’s sleeve. “Mom,” he whispered, “I don’t like this.”

Mr. Wayne overheard him and visibly brightened. “I can—” he started saying, but Catherine had already lifted up her plate and Jason’s, exchanging them in one smooth, practiced motion.

Their host wilted. “We could have ordered him something else,” he said to Catherine.

Catherine shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said. She took a defiant bite of pasta. “I like it. How do you like the bucatini, baby?”

“It’s better,” he said. There was no sauce, just salt and pepper and cheese.

Mr. Wayne exhaled softly, and they ate in silence.

Jason wished he could be as serene as Catherine and Mr. Wayne. It felt like his blood was on fire, or like he was going to throw up the pasta he’d managed to get down, but he pulled himself together.

He had to remain calm, or else his plan wouldn’t work.

He didn’t know when he’d get a chance to enact it, though. Catherine wasn’t going anywhere, and he could hardly make his pitch in front of her. She’d flip.

His opportunity came after Catherine finished her meal. She looked from Jason to Mr. Wayne and then back again at Jason. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, pulling the napkin off her lap as she stood. “I’ll be ten, maybe fifteen minutes.” She looked Mr. Wayne dead in the eye, and he nodded, the corner of his mouth ticked up.

Jason had never known his mother to take so long in the bathroom. He wondered if that was a symptom too.

“Jason,” Mr. Wayne said when she was gone, “I know this is very sudden—”

“You don’t have to pretend you care,” he snapped. He winced at how loud he was.

Mr. Wayne raised an eyebrow. “I’m not pretending. Why do you think I am?”

“This is _very sudden,_ isn’t it?” Jason echoed mockingly. “Whatever. I don’t need you to play catch with me, Mr. Wayne. We might as well put all our cards on the table.”

Mr. Wayne leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. “We might as well,” he agreed. “And what are your cards, Jason?”

It was time. “Mom’s sick. She has cancer. She needs doctors and chemotherapy and a bunch of other stuff we can’t afford.” And that she wouldn’t let Jason help her out with. “If you pay for all that, that's it. We’ll stay out of your life. You’ll never see or hear from us again. But if you don’t… I’ll go to the newspapers, the _Guardian_ and the _Gazette,_ and I’ll tell them all about your Crime Alley bastard child. And _they’ll_ pay me for the exclusive. So Mom will live anyway, but your name will be dragged through the mud.”

Jason took a deep breath. He was proud of himself. He had gotten it all out. Maybe it hadn’t come out _prettily,_ but he had gotten his point across.

Except when he glanced back up and across the table, Mr. Wayne was smiling. That was what freaked Jason out—his small, pleased smile. "You're blackmailing me," he said, sounding delighted.

"Uh… yeah. I am." _So you shouldn’t be smiling, weirdo._

Mr. Wayne shook his head, still smiling, still looking like this was the best thing that had happened all day. Was he touched in the head or something? "It was a good effort,” he said. “I'm almost sorry that I'll have to disappoint you."

Jason goggled at him. "Why?" he demanded.

“Your argument _is_ well-reasoned, Jason, but I’m afraid you made one key misjudgment. You see, I _don’t_ intend to hide you away in the attic like Bertha Mason, so threatening me with exposure doesn’t move me. You’re my child, and I intend to treat you as such—without any secrets or shame. That would make your blackmail scheme sadly impossible. Now, how do we rework your plan to account for that?”

Jason gaped at him.

“If I don’t want your secrecy, what do I want from you?” Mr. Wayne prompted.

Jason had nothing worth that kind of trade. “Well, what _do_ you want?” he asked.

“You,” Mr. Wayne answered, and when Jason made a face, he added, “ _As a son,_ Jason. Here’s my counteroffer: I am willing to pay for your mother’s medical expenses as well as pay her child support, including what I owe her from the past twelve and a half years. In exchange, you will stay with me on weekends as well as on certain holidays. And your siblings and I go on a family vacation every summer for two weeks after school lets out, which I’d like you to join us for.”

“I don’t have a passport,” Jason said uncomfortably.

“We’ll get you one.”

It sounded too easy. Jason hesitated. “I can’t leave Mom alone for weekends—or for _weeks_. She’s sick.” Catherine could die without Jason there to take care of her, and then what would happen? Jason couldn’t even imagine what would happen to him without his mom.

“Medical expenses will include any in-home care she requires, including any hired companions.”

He had a response for everything, didn’t he? “I don’t want to live with you,” Jason said bluntly.

Mr. Wayne pressed his lips together, then shrugged. “I can’t imagine you do right now. You don’t know me, and you don’t know your siblings. We’ll do our utmost to convince you otherwise over the coming weeks.”

Jason looked over to make sure the coast was clear. Still no sign of his mother. “When would this deal start?” he asked.

Bruce considered his answer carefully. He didn’t want to scare Jason off, but he also didn’t want him to overthink and panic. And the sooner he acted, the better Catherine’s odds would be. “Today would be perfect. It is sudden, but you’d only have to spend thirty hours with us at the house instead of forty-eight. I’ll return you to your mother’s apartment tomorrow after dinner.”

Still, Jason wasn’t sure. “If I do all this—I stay in your house and I go on vacation with you people—my mom stays alive?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Bruce wanted to reach out and place his hand on Jason’s, or even hug him, but he didn’t dare. _That_ would scare him off. “I can’t promise you that. You’re old enough to know how dangerous a cancer diagnosis can be. I _can_ promise you that she’ll have access to the best doctors, and if any of them can save her life, yes, she’ll live.”

"And Mom doesn't find out?" Jason gestured, waving his arm back and forth across the table. "About this?"

Bruce should tell her, but he could talk her around without betraying Jason’s confidence. He could protect them both. "I see no reason why I’d have to tell her," he said.

“Fine, then.”

Jason spat in his hand and held it out for a handshake. He almost pulled back when he realized Mr. Wayne probably didn’t finalize deals with spit shakes, but before he could, Mr. Wayne had spat in his own hand and taken hold of Jason’s.

When Catherine finally returned, Mr. Wayne told her that they had decided Jason would spend the rest of the weekend with him. Catherine went pale and said, “Yes, of course,” and Mr. Wayne said, “Let me pay the bill, and then I’ll drive you to your apartment to pick up everything he needs.”

Catherine went paler. “That’s not necessary.”

“It won’t be any trouble at all,” Mr. Wayne assured her, and Eileen hurried over with the check.

 

Catherine sat as taut as a bowstring for the entire ride to the Bowery. Bruce didn’t ask her for directions after she gave him their street address, not once. She didn’t say anything about it, but she did notice. She had known that he would investigate her, so she wasn’t surprised, but she did wish that he would pretend like he hadn’t.

Maybe he was too busy pretending that this was normal. He wasn’t acting like it was strange for him to be driving his ex—if she even counted as his ex—and his bastard son home.

Jason focused his attention on the world outside Bruce Wayne’s car. It was weird to watch the city warp from neighborhood to neighborhood, from buildings made of steel and glass to those made from bricks with boarded-up windows. He only looked away from the window a few times, each time to see how Mr. Wayne reacted as they moved northeast, deeper and deeper into the East End.

But he _didn’t_ react, not really. He might have been driving through Gotham Heights for all the interest he showed.

Once, Mr. Wayne caught his eye in the rearview mirror and gave him a small smile. Jason turned his head away. He didn’t know if that upset Mr. Wayne or not—he had no idea what was going through that man’s mind.

They came to a stop in the alley behind the Todds’ apartment building, and Mr. Wayne parked like it was the most natural thing in the world. Jason looked at the undeniably expensive car, then at the undeniably grimy neighborhood, and he told Mr. Wayne, “Your car is going to get stolen.”

Mr. Wayne smiled. “No, it won’t,” he said with undeserved confidence.

Catherine grimaced. “Jason’s right. I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“It’s fine, Catherine. And if anything does happen, I volunteered.”

Mr. Wayne followed Jason and Catherine inside their apartment building, up the staircase to the top floor and down the hallway. That was when he started to show signs of emotion. His forehead creased, and he glanced up and down the hall, staring at each of the doors, with a deepening frown.

When Catherine opened their own apartment door, he finally spoke. “Catherine, there’s no security here.”

Catherine threw her keys on the kitchen table. “There are locks,” she said. She started across the apartment like that would stop him, but Mr. Wayne was more stubborn than she was.

“Anyone with an hour of training could pick these locks, Catherine, they look like they were bought at a convenience store. And there aren’t any locks on your windows, just the one on the front door and this one on your apartment door. You might as well _ask_ someone to take Jason.”

Catherine’s cheeks burned red. Jason _saw_ red. “No one’s going to take me!” he protested. “We’ve got a baseball bat anyway, in case someone comes in.”

Mr. Wayne’s face went soft and sad, and he opened his mouth to say something, but Catherine said, “We’ve got to pack,” before he could and pulled Jason into the bedroom.

Bruce sighed. _Way to screw that one up, Brucie,_ he thought bitterly.

He placed his hands in his pockets and glanced around the living room. It looked like any other apartment in the East End, condemnable and with rent three times as high as it should be, even were it in perfect shape, and he’d know. He had been in plenty of apartments like this in all his guises.

Davenport owned this building. _Slum lord,_ he thought with the usual disgust, and he would make sure to tip off Vicki Vale before the week was out. More likely than not, it would be buried under fluff pieces and reports about costumed criminals, but it was something he could do.

He walked over to the bookcase. It was crammed with books, so overstuffed Bruce didn’t know how they could get any out to read, and the titles varied widely from books about motorcycle maintenance to philosophical tracts to bodice-rippers. He noticed that the more shocking books were kept on the highest shelf where Jason wouldn’t have been able to reach until recently and that the most used books were the nineteenth century novels.

His eyes kept drifting to the left, however, to the water stain that filled one corner of the wall. The apartment leaked when it rained, and from the chill of the room, even in the spring, he could tell there was a draft.

Plenty of Matches Malone’s contacts had families and children who lived with them, and he had cringed every time to see how bad their living conditions were. But it was different when it was his own child. It was different when he _knew_ that Jason never _needed_ to live in a place like this. Bruce Wayne had always been a city away. He would have done anything to help Catherine and their son, and he needed to know that there had been a good reason why she hadn’t reached out to him, even after Willis Todd’s death.

He had to see the worst of it. He needed to know what he was working with.

His feet took him into the bathroom where he winced when he saw the black mold behind the toilet, inexpertly treated. In the kitchen he heard the groaning of the fridge, and he reached out to feel the perspiration on the lukewarm soda bottles. The other appliances looked no better. The coffee machine reminded him of the one his parents had used twenty-five years ago, and he doubted it had been rewired.

Above his head, the people in the apartment above stomped their feet as they moved from room to room.

Bruce returned to the living room and fell onto the futon, which groaned in protest. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a coffee table in even worse shape. If they had ever owned a television, it was long gone, and Bruce knew better than to look for a computer or a phone.

He had been just across the city this entire time.

 

Jason was only going to be gone for a day and a half, so it didn’t take long for Catherine to dig through his drawers or for Jason to ball up the shirts and pants she’d picked out. They didn’t own anything resembling luggage, so he just threw them into his backpack when he was done. He kept his schoolwork in there too in case he had time to get ahead in math.

They could hear Mr. Wayne moving around the apartment, but besides Catherine’s blush, they didn’t acknowledge it. There was nothing they could do about it.

Catherine had to push Jason out the door when they were done, and they found Mr. Wayne sitting on the futon, his head in his hands. “There’s no security,” he said in a low voice, “there’s black mold in the bathroom, the refrigerator is dying, and the ceiling leaks whenever it rains. Are there any other problems I should be aware of?”

“None of that is any of your business,” Jason snapped while Catherine just _stood there_ , blushing and silent.

“It is very much my business, Jason, and your mother knows that.” To Catherine, Mr. Wayne said, “On Monday you and I are going to have a long talk—to settle things before we get the lawyers involved. There will be… _provisions_ regarding Jason’s housing until he turns eighteen.”

“That’s not necessary,” Catherine said.

“It is.”

“Considering how things are—”

Mr. Wayne was standing. He towered over Catherine, but he ducked his head to meet her eyes. “You’re not dead yet. Obviously we’ll prepare for the worst possible scenario, but there’s no need to act as though it’s guaranteed.”

Catherine looked over at Jason before saying, softly, “We’ll talk on Monday.”

“Excellent. I’ll have Jason back here by eight tomorrow.”

“Wonderful.”

Jason clutched his backpack to his chest. He wasn’t going to back out of the deal—he’d _promised_ , after all—but, still. He didn’t want to leave Catherine alone, not now and not in the weekends to come, and he didn’t want to go to some stranger’s home and meet more strangers.

Mr. Wayne reached out his hand to squeeze Jason’s shoulder. “I’m going to head down to the car, alright? Come down when you’re ready,” he said, and he leaned in to murmur something in Catherine’s ear.

The door had barely shut behind him before Jason threw himself into his mother’s arms.

 

Twelve minutes later, Jason slunk into the car and slammed the door shut behind him, hoping the cold water had fixed his face like Catherine said it would. He didn’t want Mr. Wayne to know he was crying. Willis had never liked it when Jason cried, even though he’d cried plenty when he was high off his ass.

“You’ll be back tomorrow,” Mr. Wayne reminded him.

Jason focused on buckling himself in.

“Jason—" He hesitated. "It’s not the same thing, I know, but I lost my parents when I was only a couple years younger than you are now. The fear you’re feeling is natural. Everything you’re feeling right now is natural and normal.”

Jason didn’t respond.

Mr. Wayne sighed. “And you don’t have to call me _Mr. Wayne_. Or _Dad_. I understand. That needs to be earned. Until that time comes—or even if it never does—please, call me Bruce.”

“Won’t I have to, though?” Jason asked quietly. “In front of other people?”

“Don’t worry about other people’s opinions, Jason. It’s our family, not theirs.”

Jason didn’t know how to respond to that. He wanted to say _we’re not family,_ but the DNA test said that they were and he didn’t want to start a fight with Mr. Wayne— _Bruce_ —when they were stuck in a car together for probably ages.

Then he wanted to remind him of all the articles people wrote about the Waynes and all the segments on the news about him and his children. Those people seemed to think that the Waynes belonged to them, and weren’t they a little bit right after so many years and so many generations? The Waynes had founded this city. They still owned most of it. Maybe the people of Gotham owned them back.

Jason sunk into the seat and didn’t say anything at all as the car drove west towards Crest Hill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we have Bruce (finally!), a lunch at a restaurant I cobbled together from five different skyscraper restaurant menus, and the reveal of Jason's plan from last chapter, which goes as well as you'd expect from an eleven-year-old who has less than a week to put it together. Next chapter introduces Dick, Cass, and Tim (and Alfred), so hopefully that's something you're all looking forward to.
> 
>  **Edited 3/2/2018.** I changed to an omniscient narrator and made Bruce's thought process clearer and softened up his language because commenters the first time around did not give him the benefit of the doubt. I also fixed some issues with the timeline.
> 
> Solomon Wayne and Cyrus Pinkney's friendship is canonical and comes from _Batman: The Destroyer._


	4. Wayne Manor

Cassandra couldn’t stop herself from pacing back and forth across the drawing room. She was too nervous and excited to sit down like her brothers were. Honestly she couldn’t understand _how_ Dick and Tim could sit still right now. Cassandra had been a jumble of emotions ever since Alfred called them all downstairs and said that their father would be home soon— _and_ he was bringing Jason with him.

She couldn’t understand why they weren’t excited too. Their father was, and Alfred was. Everyone was excited about Jason except the two of them, and Cassandra couldn’t understand Dick’s boredom and irritation or Tim’s sulking.

Dick stuck his foot out as Cassandra walked by him, but she dodged his attempt at tripping her without breaking her stride. “It’s like you’re not even trying,” she said.

“If I were trying, you’d know,” he replied. Which was ridiculous. Dick had nothing on _her_. He was six years older, and he had been trained since birth by two of the best acrobats in the world, but Cassandra always knew what his next move was before he made it. That was why they didn’t fight anymore. Dick said he had grown up, but the truth was that he was tired of losing to her every time.

Their younger brother _definitely_ hadn’t grown up. “You’re so _annoying,_ ” Tim whined. Cassandra stomped louder when she passed by him. “Are you going to do this _the whole time_?”

“Maybe.”

Dick scoffed.

Were they _trying_ to be awful? “I’m _so_ sorry that I’m excited to meet our brother,” she said sarcastically.

Tim made a face. Cassandra made one right back at him.

Dick wished his sister hadn't gotten so excited. He had been preparing himself for disaster ever since they got the news, and he had hoped his brother and sister would too. He should have known better than to think Cassandra would be as skeptical of this Jason character as Tim. She was eighteen months older than she was, but living without a mother had made her more desperate for personal connections than either Dick or Tim.

If it were some other kid, Dick might have let her get herself worked up, but _this one_ was not worth Cassandra's inevitable disappointment. The Todd file was a stack of police reports and medical files, and there had been speculation about even worse things, in between Willis Todd's involvement with Two-Face and Catherine Johnson's employment at every shady restaurant and bar the Bowery had to offer. The kid didn't have a chance. A juvenile delinquent was going to walk through their front door, and Cassandra was completely unprepared.

He had to warn her.

“Don’t be,” Dick said. “I saw his file. Your brand-spanking-new brother is just another East End delinquent. His stepfather was in and out of prison for _years_ before he got offed by another prisoner, and his mom was on heroin. She even overdosed once. And I bet he’s no better. It isn’t like he’s had any better examples, living in Bowery tenements.”

“His file,” Cassandra repeated flatly as Tim stared at Dick in wonderment.

“Dad had a private investigator put it together,” he lied.

Cassandra didn’t look away until Dick did, blushing and clearing his throat. His sister had definitely inherited their father's glare.

Cassandra figured the file existed, but she knew no private investigator had touched it. She didn’t bother asking how it had _really_ come to be. Dick lied as much as Bruce did to protect the Big Secret.

Tim crossed his arms, smug. He had known there was something suspicious about this kid from the start. “Why is Dad even bringing him back home? I don't understand. He could just pay them off instead of inviting some child criminal into our home.”

Their father had told them that Jason’s mom was sick. It was perfectly obvious to _Cassandra_ why Jason was coming to stay with them, if whatever his mom had was serious. “Of course you don’t understand. Dad’s a _good_ person,” she sneered.

Dick snorted.

Tim ignored her. “Do you think Dad’s going to put him in the will?” he asked Dick anxiously. Dick only shrugged, so Tim went on. “That will split everything _four_ ways instead of _three_. My mom says that our inheritance is already split too many ways, and there's still the company. Dad hasn't officially said who gets the company yet.”

Cassandra rolled her eyes. “No one cares about that. No one cares what your mother says either.”

Tim scowled. “Dad says we always have to be respectful towards each other’s mothers. You're just jealous that I _have_ a mom.”

"Tim," Dick said, too mild for it to be scolding.

Cassandra was too mature to lose her cool over that, and besides, it wasn't the first time Tim had thrown that in her face. He hadn't been the first one to do it either. “Dad doesn’t respect _your_ mother,” she told him coldly. “You call tell every time he talks about her.”

Her brothers looked at her like she was making things up, but Cassandra knew she was right. Bruce _hated_ Janet. He got stiff and awkward whenever he talked about Mary, and he had been so sad and regretful the one time Cassandra had asked him about her mother… but whenever he talked about _Janet,_ his whole body went tense, so tense he actually shook a little, and he was very, very careful to only say things that were objectively true about her.

She wondered how he’d talk about Jason’s mom.

“You don't need to be _mean,_ ” Tim snapped.

Cassandra folded her arms across her chest. “Right back at you.”

It had to be easy for Dick and Tim to write Jason off before they even met him. _They_ had families. They had mothers and stepfathers and other sisters, but Cassandra only had them and their father.

But now she had Jason too, and she was going to be the best sister he could possibly imagine. He was going to be so grateful to her that he wouldn’t spare Dick and Tim another thought. They were welcome to Rachel Grayson and the Drake girls. Jason could be _her_ brother, hers and hers alone.

He could be Bruce’s son too. She would allow that. He had been so happy last night at dinner when he’d told them they had another brother. Maybe their father was relieved too that Jason’s stepfather was dead and he didn’t have any competition either.

Cassandra wasn’t thrilled that they still had to share Jason with his mother, but at least it was only her. Bruce had said so. _It’s just Jason and his mother, and she’s very sick,_ he had told Cassandra when she’d gone into his study after dinner last night to ask him more about her new brother. _Jason won’t be at his best when you meet him. He’ll be worried and scared for his mom, so you’ll have to be patient with him until he settles in._

Cassandra had promised him that she would be.

The drawing room was on the opposite side of the house from the front drive, so they didn’t hear the car drive up. And they definitely didn’t hear Alfred, who could be as silent as a mouse when he wanted to be, open the door for them. The first sign of their arrival was when the doorknob turned.

 

Bruce tried three times to start a conversation with him, but Jason wouldn’t play along. He didn’t care that the traffic wasn’t too bad for a Saturday (and he’d never been in a car on a Saturday to compare it with), he didn’t think the weather was all that great, and he didn’t believe that his half-sister was really excited to meet him.

Jason imagined how _he’d_ react if his mother had shown up one day with a new kid, and he cringed.

There was a lot to cringe about. He was beginning to think this wasn’t a great idea. He was in a car with a complete stranger, preparing to spend _days_ with him and away from his sick mom, and what he did know about his housemates didn’t impress him much.

Bruce didn’t _seem_ like a drunken ne’er-do-well who’d managed to knock up four women in seven years’ time, but they never did, did they? Catherine and her friends were always cautioning each other to be careful when they started new relationships. “He seems perfectly nice, and _then,_ ” they said to each other every time. Like a reverse prayer.

Jason glanced at Bruce out of the corner of his eye as he drove, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. Jason could see the muscles in his arm flexing through his button-up shirt, and he couldn’t imagine a single good reason why Bruce Wayne should be that built. No billionaire needed muscles like that.

Maybe he was just vain. Or _maybe_ …

Jason looked away.

It took them an hour to get to Wayne Manor, an hour with only the radio standing in between them and the most awkward silence of Jason’s young life. By the time they got there, Jason was almost relieved.

Then he saw the house.

Four apartments ago, during one of Willis’s longer stints in prison and one of Catherine’s longer stints sober, they’d lived right next to an old movie theater. Catherine had taken Jason there every Saturday morning when the manager liked to dust off old films and show them for half-price. She hadn't had Saturday morning shifts at any of her jobs back then, so they’d been able to go every week and see whichever movie the manager put on.

The manager had liked Hitchcock, and they'd seen them all— _Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest_ —before they had to move again. But it wasn't _North by Northwest_ that came to mind when they drove up to Wayne Manor, though, but _Rebecca_. This mansion was more Victorian than Elizabethan, but Wayne Manor and Manderley weren't entirely dissimilar. Both houses managed to give off the same vibe, even though one was fictional and the other very much wasn't.

_You are not welcome here. This is not your place._

“What do you think?” Bruce asked after he had pulled the car in front of his ridiculously huge mansion.

Jason wasn’t even thinking when he asked, “Does Mrs. Danvers live here too?”

Bruce laughed. “No, just us and Alfred. The housecleaning staff and the gardeners only come on weekdays.”

 _Of course_ there were maids. Heaven forbid Gotham’s Prince and his precious heirs clean up after themselves.

They climbed out of the car. Bruce just left it there, unlocked, in front of the giant staircase that led up to his house. Jason was thinking about maybe— _maybe_ , not _definitely—_ asking if there was a garage when the front door opened, and he looked up to see some old man staring down at them from the open doorway.

Bruce set a hand on Jason’s shoulder and guided him up the stairs.

The old man stepped aside to let them into the house, somehow giving the impression of bowing without actually bowing. “Welcome home, Master Bruce,” he said, in an English accent, as he took Bruce’s jacket from him without looking away from Jason once.

Bruce squeezed Jason’s shoulder. “Jason, this is Alfred Pennyworth, the butler here. Alfred, my son Jason.”

Mr. Pennyworth’s mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. “It is very good to meet you at long last, Master Jason.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Jason demanded.

 _At long last._ Why would Mr. Pennyworth say _at long last_ when Jason had only learned that Bruce Wayne was his biological father two weeks ago? Jason had a good guess, and if this butler thought he could get away with saying something about his mother, he had another thing coming.

His eyebrows rose. “I merely meant that, under normal circumstances, we would have met nearly twelve years ago.”

“Under _normal circumstances,_ ” Jason returned hotly, “we never would have met at all.”

Bruce’s fingers twitched against his shoulder. “The circumstances are what they are, Jason,” he said.

Mr. Pennyworth stood even straighter and stiffer, somehow. “Master Richard, Miss Cassandra, and Master Timothy are waiting in the drawing room as you requested, sir,” he said, and he took the car keys Bruce handed him, heading out the front door to apparently park Bruce’s car for him. Bruce wasn't going to put his own car in the garage? How lazy could you get?

Jason shrugged out of Bruce’s hold as the butler scurried outside. Bruce exhaled. They were off to a _wonderful_ start already, and Jason hadn't even met his siblings yet. “Alfred didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “I promise. You should apologize to him.”

The butler _had_ meant something by it, and Jason would apologize on a cold day in Hell. “Is that an order?” he asked.

Bruce frowned. “Does it need to be?”

“Yes.”

Bruce shook his head and took off down the hall. Jason took a second to figure out that he was supposed to follow him.

The house was just as ridiculous inside as it was outside. Jason couldn’t see a single reason why someone would need a house the size of a city block, let alone one this _ornate._ Every inch of the walls were covered in paintings of Wayne ancestors framed in gold, and there were statues and vases and potted plants in every single corner. He tried to count the doors and windows before giving up, knowing it would take more time than he wanted to dedicate to that. He scuffed his toe against the floor to check if it were _real_ wood, and he snorted when he discovered it was.

“Is something the matter?” Bruce asked.

 _Everything,_ Jason wanted to say. _Everything is the matter, and I have to keep quiet or else you’ll let my mom die._

“No,” he said.

Bruce stopped in front of a door indistinguishable from the ten or so they’d passed. “This is the drawing room,” he said so that Jason would know to grit his teeth and stand his ground as Bruce turned the doorknob.

The Wayne kids didn’t look anything like the children Jason had known all his life. They looked like the fake kids in catalogues, the ones that made Catherine roll her eyes and ask, “Who dresses their kids up like that? They’ll be covered in mud in five seconds, mark my words. And then those fancy clothes will be just as shabby as the ones you could get for _a_ _tenth_ the price.”

Apparently Bruce didn’t agree with Catherine’s thrift.

Again, Bruce laid his hand on Jason’s shoulder and squeezed. Jason couldn’t wriggle out of his hold in front of Bruce’s children. “Jason, I’d like to introduce you to Dick… Cassandra… and Tim…” He indicated each in turn with a tilt of his head. Dick nodded, Cassandra smiled, and Tim scowled. “Everyone, this is your brother Jason,” he concluded.

“Hi!” Cassandra said, beaming.

Jason wondered what she was getting out of this. Maybe Daddy promised her a new pony if she pretended to be nice to the bastard son. “Hey,” he mumbled.

Her shoulders drooped.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Tim asked.

Jason stiffened. He hated this stupid shirt and these stupider pants, but they were the nicest he owned. Catherine had spent a lot of money on them, and no billionaire’s brat got to judge his mom's taste.

 _“Timothy,”_ Bruce said warningly.

“I’m just asking!”

“You’re asking inappropriate questions. Apologize.”

“M’sorry,” he muttered insincerely.

Dick hadn’t said a word at all. He was looking at Jason like he was something disgusting he wanted to scrape off the bottom of his shoe, and if Jason were anywhere else in the world, he’d be demanding that Dick either speak his mind or wipe that goddamn expression off his face.

Unfortunately he was _here_ , and he was going to have to play the good son, Friday through Sunday, from now on. And he had already wasted the good son’s weekly allowance of temper on the butler.

Bruce exhaled sharply and pinned his children with a flat stare. “I’m going to give Jason a tour of the house,” he said shortly. “You three can take this time to come up with conversation topics for dinner, how about that?”

 

Bruce started the lecture as soon as they had left the drawing room. This wasn't his first time giving a tour of the house. He had memorized the script long ago.

"Charles Wayne bought the land you're standing on right now in the 1830s," he said as he led Jason down the hall of horrors, "but it was his sons—Joshua and Solomon—who built the house, which was completed in 1860. Charles's sons were abolitionists who used their property as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Unfortunately, one night, several slave-catchers managed to follow the escapees to the property. Joshua drew the slave-catchers away from the house, and he tricked them into following him across rope bridge. He cut the ropes, sending them down into the ravine and killing them. Joshua died shortly afterwards from his injuries. Solomon and Dorothea buried him secretly on the property to avoid involving the law, and his body remains in an unmarked grave, somewhere on our property, to this day."

“Cool,” Jason said, reluctantly impressed.

Bruce nodded. “Very cool,” he agreed. “Joshua was your… great-great-great-great-great-uncle.”

Less cool. Jason had already gained too many relatives today. He didn’t need an uncle from the nineteenth century to add to the family tree, let alone another Wayne. He took comfort in knowing that Joshua wouldn’t want him either. Old Joshua Wayne's lost corpse would start rolling in its unmarked grave if he ever heard about how his descendant had fathered a child on a girl from the Bowery.

Jason wrinkled his nose. On second thought, Joshua had probably fathered a kid or two on a girl from the Bowery. Gabby Christensen’s older sister Samantha had told them that their neighborhood had been named after the bowers where the sex workers used to bring their clients. Then she’d explained to them that a “bower” was a woman's bedroom. "But, like, a fancy one," she'd added.

But Joshua wouldn’t have _acknowledged_ those kids. He definitely wouldn't have brought them home to Wayne Manor.

Bruce opened a door. “This is the billiards room,” he said.

That was another nice enough room, but Jason couldn't let the name stand. "The game is called _pool,_ " he told Bruce. He had been in pool halls before, and he knew what the game was called and how to play it.

“The pool room sounds like a place where people swim,” Bruce claimed, sounding very fond of his billiards room all of the sudden. He gestured to the window. “I’d take you out onto the terrace, but it’s too cold out. Maybe next week it will have warmed up, and you can see the grounds then too.”

“Maybe.”

The movie room earned a scoff. Bruce figured he deserved that, and he only kept Jason there long enough to explain that it had been the smoking room before his grandmother exiled his grandfather to the terrace if Patrick _had_ to smoke. However much Jason enjoyed watching movies, only absurdly rich people had a movie theater inside their home, and Jason did not enjoy the absurdity of being rich. Bruce didn't think there was much Jason would enjoy about his new lifestyle.

Luckily, the library was next on the tour.

Jason quickly decided that was the only room in the house worth having. There were walls and walls of bookcases, _two stories’ worth,_ each and every one of them filled with books with spines a hundred different colors. Jason goggled at them and wondered if it were possible to read them all in a single lifetime. He goggled at the furniture, the chairs and couches and tables where people read those books, and he asked, “Where’s the rest of the couch?” as he pointed to a couch that was missing half its back and one of its armrests.

Bruce smiled. “It’s a chaise lounge. They’re supposed to look that way.”

Who would deliberately build half a couch? Jason wondered. “It looks stupid,” he said.

“Maybe, but obviously at some point in history people disagreed with you.”

Bruce pointed to a door that might have otherwise blended in with the room’s wooden paneling. “That’s my study,” he said. “There’s another door in the hallway—I’ll show you—but please don’t go inside if I’m not in there with you. I bring work home, and some of it's confidential.”

It was pretty bold of him to assume that Jason wanted to go inside his study in the first place.

Jason was relieved to discover that _the_ _parlor_ was just what rich people called the living room, and Bruce only gave him a few seconds to sneer at the fucking _ballroom_ before he said, "Let's go see the breakfast room."

Jason thought the breakfast room was just a stupid name for a dining room until he saw the _actual_ dining room, which was five times the breakfast room’s size and could probably fit hundred people comfortably. “We usually eat in the breakfast room,” Bruce was quick to assure him. “The dining room is too big for just the—the _five_ of us. Even when we have guests, we prefer to eat in the breakfast room. I'm not in the habit of bringing business associates home to bore my children, so our guests are predominately friends and family who don't mind the more modest surroundings.”

"Mom and I eat on the futon," he said.

"Not even I own a couch big enough for all five of us," Bruce said.

Mr. Pennyworth was cooking in the kitchen, which was the only room in the "servants' quarters" that Bruce deigned to show Jason. He spoke to Bruce a bit about the pot roast he was making for dinner, but Jason stood to the side and pretended he wasn’t there. Neither of them addressed him, though they were both _staring_ at him out of the corner of their eyes, until Bruce said it was time to take the tour upstairs.

 _Great,_ Jason thought sarcastically.

 

On the stairs, they ran into the dog.

Bruce could have kicked himself. He hadn't considered Ace once during this entire affair, but he should have. He should have _known_ that Jason would freeze up when he laid eyes on the German Shepherd, cringing away from him as Ace padded towards him, sniffing the newcomer curiously and wagging his tail.

 _How_ he should have known was not a question he could answer.

"This is Ace," Bruce said uncomfortably as his son inched behind Bruce, the dog following close behind. "He was Dick's Christmas present a few years back.—Do you not like dogs, Jason?"

Jason flinched. "I'm not afraid of dogs," he snapped, and he shoved his hand forward for Ace to sniff and lick even though it obviously horrified him.

It was stupid of him, Jason knew. Ace looked nothing like Sparky had. But Jason hadn't been comfortable around any breed of dog since Sparky's death. Even ancient Mr. Gomez's little pug, which couldn't hurt anybody no matter how hard it tried, made him feel uneasy in a way he couldn't explain. Every time he looked at one, he just felt _sick_ and he couldn't help but remember what Sparky had looked like after…

He yanked his hand away.

Bruce gently pushed Ace back and said, "Go find Dick. _Dick._ " Hearing his master's name made Ace's ears perk up, and he scampered down the stairs to find him while Bruce and Jason remained standing on the stairs.

"Jason," Bruce said when the dog was out of sight, "I don't want you to feel uncomfortable here. If Ace bothers you…"

"I'm _fine._ " Jason took a deep breath. "Can we finish this fucking tour before I'm a hundred years old?"

Bruce tousled his hair. "Language," he scolded lightly.

Jason saw the tight, pitying look in Bruce's eyes and smacked his hand away. He didn't need pity from some rich asshole who couldn't even imagine what Willis had done to Sparky or how it was all Jason's fault.

Jason took the stairs two at a time. Bruce had to chase after him.

 

The second floor was a little less gilded than the rest of the manor, but that didn't say much. It was still too lavish to be believed, and everything was so well-made and so casually  _old_ and  _rich_ that it was impossible to disguise how expensive it was. “Do you want to see the library balcony?” Bruce asked hopefully, and that was how Jason found himself admiring the books from the balcony like he’d admired them from the ground floor.

The room next-door had been the schoolroom back when the Wayne children were taught by tutors and governesses rather than sent to school, and now it was like a reading room. “Your siblings almost never come in here,” Bruce said, not looking at Jason so pointedly he might as well stared at him instead. Anyway, Jason wasn't that desperate for a sanctuary. Yet. “They’re not readers. My mother liked it, though—She said it had good light. The books on the wall are hers.”

Jason scanned the titles half-heartedly, feeling like it was his _duty_ (and not one he enjoyed), while Bruce watched him eagerly. He decided not to tell him that Martha Wayne could have expanded her horizons by venturing outside gothic fiction once or twice.

Jason had no interest in the video games in the playroom (“It used to have toys,” Bruce said nostalgically), but he was a little relieved to see they had a real living room with a TV and comfortable-looking couches.

He scoffed at the personal gym before he gave it a second look and realized how _weird_ it was. Jason had never gone into the gyms in his neighborhood—they were all owned by gangs who didn't let snot-nosed brats inside unless their dad was a member, and Willis had never been good enough for that—but he had peered into the windows before. He knew what _used_ gym equipment looked like.

This gym wasn't used. It was barely touched.

Jason backed out of the room, unnerved.

"Are you alright?" Bruce asked with that same look of concern from the stairs.

Jason opened his mouth to ask, _How the hell are you so built if you don't ever use your gym?_ He came to his senses before he did, though, and he only said, "I'm fine. What's next?"

"The bedrooms are all that's left," Bruce said.

There were twenty-three bedrooms, Bruce admitted almost guiltily, and they hadn’t all been full in generations. The ones in use were marked with signs—circus animals and ringmasters for _Richard,_ ballet dancers for _Cassandra,_ and video game consoles for _Timothy_. Bruce’s door didn’t have one, but he made a big deal of pointing it out and saying that his door was always open to Jason, no matter what time it was or what it was Jason could need.

_Right._

The door they stopped in front of was unmarked. “This was my aunt Agatha’s room before she got married,” Bruce said, but the room didn’t look like it might belong to a woman in her twenties.

It didn’t look like it might belong to _anyone._ The walls were painted butter yellow, and the furniture was made from some dark wood with leaf-patterned green fabric everywhere there wasn’t wood. Jason noticed the bed first, bigger than his bed and Catherine’s put together, with drapes right out of Harry Potter, then the nightstands, _four_ chairs that Jason would obviously need for his four asses, another half-couch, a desk and a vanity, and the painting of some long-dead Wayne ancestor staring down, judging him.

There was a fireplace too, and two doors leading somewhere Jason couldn’t guess, and the wall opposite the bed was almost entirely made up of windows. There were only four windows in Jason and Catherine’s _whole_ apartment, and their apartment was the same exact size as this one room in Wayne Manor.

“Do you like it?” Bruce asked, sounding nervous for the first time all day. Nervousness didn’t suit him, or his deep voice.

He didn’t. “It’s fine,” he said.

Bruce looked around the room like he was trying to pinpoint what exactly was so offensive. Jason almost pitied him. He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that Jason hated every inch of his house—his _mansion._ “We can change things,” he said. “Whatever you don’t like, no matter what it is, we can fix it. I want you to feel at home here, Jason.”

Home was Catherine and their books crammed onto the teetering bookcases and chili dogs from Manny’s and the smell of fresh-baked pastries from the panaderia down the street every morning. Not _this._ “That’s not going to happen,” he said quietly.

Bruce sighed. His other children hadn't been so difficult, not at the beginning at least. He had known his role in their lives. There were scripts for the absentee biological father and for the overworked single father, but he didn't have such an obvious role in Jason's life. Perhaps if Catherine had come forward earlier…

But she hadn't, and Bruce wasn't enough of a hypocrite to judge someone for being the victim of an abusive relationship or for using drugs.

“Just… keep an open mind, Jason," he begged. "Please.”

Jason could _try,_ he guessed. Bruce was going to pay for Catherine’s medical bills. He might be the only thing standing in between her and the grave, so the least Jason could do was try to find something likable about him.

“Fine,” he muttered.

There was a long pause as they both waited for _something,_ but whatever it was, it never came. “Dinner is at six o’clock,” Bruce said briskly as he headed out the door. “You can… unpack your bag, or decompress, until then. I’ll be in my study if you need anything—anything _at all_ , Jason—and your siblings are around here somewhere.”

“Right,” Jason said.

“Right,” Bruce said.

Jason waited until he was sure Bruce was gone before throwing his backpack down on the ground and himself on to the chaise lounge that apparently every growing boy needed in his bedroom.

He lay there until dinnertime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Edited 3/29/2019.** In addition to changing the POV to an omniscient narrator, I fixed up and expanded the tour of Wayne Manor, added Ace the Bat-Hound and mentioned Jason's childhood dog Sparky, and altered the timeline a little (which I'm going to explain that in a later chapter's notes).


	5. Evening Plans

Dinner wasn’t the disaster Bruce feared it would be. It wasn’t the success he had wanted either, but he had known that was an unlikely hope from the start. His children were _children_. They couldn’t be blamed for their emotional immaturity. All of them had been thrust into a strange and unfamiliar situation.

He had to prompt them several times to keep talking, but Dick, Cassandra, and Tim managed to keep up their end of conversation. It only took a few questions before Dick was talking about gymnastics, Cassandra was talking about her dance classes, and Tim was talking about video games. It was almost like another night until they remembered they had a guest.

Jason didn’t speak much at all, and Bruce didn't know what questions he could ask to get him started. He only spoke when someone addressed him directly, and even then he kept his head down and picked at his food disinterestedly. It probably didn't help that the only questions Bruce could think to ask were _do you have any homework_ and _what are you reading._ Jason said no, then shrugged, and after that, only Cassandra asked him questions.

He wasn't thrilled about the seating arrangement. He'd only said, "Oh," when Bruce had gestured to the seat at his left, next to Tim and across from Dick. For a second, Bruce considered explaining that he wasn't trying to have Jason surrounded, but the truth might not be welcome right now either. Bruce could guess that Jason wouldn't be happy to hear that he had been summarily given the second eldest child's place at the table, pushing Cassandra and Tim each down a rung.

Tim wasn't happy either. Jason was a downgrade after a lifetime of sitting next to Dick, and he sulked whenever he saw this supposed brother of his from the corner of his eye. He was _upset,_ and no one cared except _maybe_ Dick. He couldn't wait until his weekly phone call with his mother. _She_ would understand him… Only, he wasn't sure how to tell her. His father let Tim talk to Janet privately, even though (as Alfred had told Tim several times before) he wasn't legally required to, but that didn't stop anyone else from wandering into the room when Tim was on the phone.

His sister would have _a fit_ if she overheard him telling his mother the truth. Cassandra had made her opinion clear earlier—she hated his mother, and she loved stupid _Jason_ even though they'd never met before.

 _She_ had gotten stupider lately too. Ever since she'd turned ten and Chilly had retired, she had gotten as insufferable as Dick was. She never wanted to do anything fun anymore, and when he tried to complain to Alfred, Alfred had told him that young ladies had different tastes than young gentlemen. Bruce hadn't agreed, not exactly. He'd told his youngest son that Cassandra was her own person, and they were at the stage in their lives where they were developing as individuals. "Maybe you should try to make friends at school," Bruce said.

Tim _had_ friends at school, but they couldn't always be around. Cassandra was, and Chilly had been too. But Mrs. Chilton had been their father's nanny before Bruce had hired her to watch his children, and she was so ancient everyone agreed it was past time for her to retire. Still, Tim missed her. She had never told him no, and when she was around, she hadn't let Cassandra say no either, not unless she had a very good reason like dance classes or tutoring.

From time to time, Dick glanced over to watch Tim sulk and twist in his chair to avoid any physical contact with the older child, and he just managed to keep from snickering aloud. The kid was lucky. He was still young enough to get away with that. Dick's only option was to deal with it like the near-adult he was and stay stonily silent.

Yesterday, when Bruce had told his children about their newfound brother, Dick had snapped, " _Really,_ another one?"

Bruce had replied, "Yes, another one. And I expect you to be polite, Richard Bruce Wayne."

Based on Bruce's occasional glare, he didn't his firstborn was holding up his end of the bargain. Dick didn't care.

In comparison to Tim and Dick, Cassandra was an angel. She tried to include Jason in every conversation, no matter how unenthusiastically he discussed homework and afterschool activities and the teachers they hated, and she smiled whenever they met eyes. Bruce was so pleased with her he only said, “Cassie, we chew with our mouths _closed,_ ” once, even though she deserved to hear it ten times.

When they were done eating, Bruce asked, “Why don’t we watch a movie?” He figured that would be perfect. They could sit together as a family without needing to speak to each other.

None of the children were thrilled by the idea, but only Dick was _surprised_ by it. “You’re not going out tonight?” he asked.

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed.

“Obviously I’m not,” Bruce said curtly. Dick knew better than to even allude to Batman in front of his siblings. “You head into the theater while I have a word with Alfred. And I believe it should be Jason’s turn to choose the movie.”

Jason's shoulders fell while his brothers made faces and his sister perked up as they all wondered what kind of movie Jason would pick. The four left the breakfast room in a herd. It was so adorable Bruce wished that he had his phone to take a photo.

He didn't have a single photo of his family together. He didn't have a single photo of _Jason,_ and he would have to ask Catherine for copies of all her photographs. That could be one of his conditions.

It wasn't long before Alfred returned to collect the dishes. Bruce assumed he knew everything that had gone on during the meal like he always did, and not for the first time, Bruce questioned why the architect of Wayne Manor had put in so many secret passageways and hiding spots. “Dinner was excellent,” he said. Alfred didn't object to the compliment. “Jason barely ate, though, and his lunch disagreed with him… I don’t want him to go to bed hungry.”

Alfred's head was bent over as he grabbed another plate. “I can bring popcorn upstairs in perhaps an hour,” he said.

Bruce nodded. “That will be perfect, thank you.”

Alfred wasn’t done yet. “Master Jason is a… _sensitive_ child, isn’t he?” he said. That was the only way he could think to put it.

Bruce wondered if he was going to spend the next twenty-four hours running interference between everyone in his house. “I wouldn’t call him _sensitive_ ," he said carefully, "but he is very protective of his mother, and he is careful of what people say about her. He reacts badly to even _implied_ criticism of her.”

“I didn’t mean to imply anything about Mrs. Todd,” Alfred said huffily. Not that the woman deserved his discretion.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. Jason might have overreacted when he lashed out, but Alfred had spoken like there was someone to blame for Jason’s late introduction to the family. Intended or not, the implication had been there. “All the same,” he said, “Jason requires gentle handling for the time being. I won’t allow him to misbehave, of course, but there’s no reason to upset him unnecessarily.”

“I agree, sir,” Alfred said.

 

Cassandra had her arms crossed and her face screwed up when Bruce entered the theater. “He let Tim pick the movie!” she blurted out the second he opened the door.

Bruce bit back a sigh. “That was very kind of you, Jason,” he said. He had hoped—like Cassandra had, no doubt—that his choice of movie would give him an insight into Jason himself. He had mentioned _Rebecca_ earlier when they drove up to the house, but it was too famous of a movie to hint at Jason's taste. Catherine had said their son would read anything, and the books in their apartment had been a incomprehensible mix of classic literature and pulp fiction.

Of course, Cassandra was _also_ upset because Tim had now chosen the movie twice in a row. His children had a remarkable fixation on their turns.

Jason didn't look at Bruce as he shrugged.

He was sitting on the other end of the room, and his siblings were already sitting between him and his father. It was disappointing that he was spending so little time with Jason, but that was the way it was. Bruce couldn’t ask his other children to move down so he could sit next to their brother, not when everyone was primed for a meltdown, and pestering Jason wouldn't help the meltdown situation any. So Bruce turned off the lights and took the chair next to Tim, who twisted around to cling to him, as Dick hit “play.”

 

They ended up watching the sequel too before Bruce sent his children upstairs to their rooms. Perhaps he was indulging too much by letting them stay up so late, but he didn't want the detente to end, and it _was_ Saturday night. Dick lingered until Bruce ordered him to join his siblings’ exodus with a firm “It’s bedtime.” Cassandra was chattering away, discussing every aspect of the movies, while Jason nodded and said “uh-huh” and “I guess” and “not really.”

Bruce waited, making sure they were all securely in their rooms, before he headed downstairs.

He had planned on a quiet night spent monitoring the others' patrols and doing gruntwork, but Selina was waiting for him in the Cave, dressed in her Catwoman costume with the cowl off, curled up in his chair in front of the computer. “Shouldn’t you be on patrol?” he asked.

“Hello to you too, stranger,” she said. When he didn’t reply, she stood up and stepped aside to let him to take his seat. “You called in sick today. Maybe I was a little worried that your newest baby mama stabbed you and left you for dead, leaving you to use the last of your strength to call Dinah and tell her you couldn’t go out tonight.”

“Her name is _Catherine_ , and she wouldn’t stab anybody.” The thought was rather funny, actually. Bruce imagined Catherine, with her wide green eyes and anxious smile, brandishing a knife at him, and almost laughed out loud.

“And the kid?” Selina asked.

Bruce hesitated. He didn’t know how to describe his newfound son. _Independent, determined, devoted. He likes to read._ Eventually he settled on, “Jason is stronger-willed than Catherine, but I don’t think he’s capable of assault either.” Then, “He’s upstairs.”

Selina looked upwards, staring at the cave ceiling as though she thought she could see through it and the next two floors if she tried hard enough. “You _are_ moving fast,” she said. “You only met him today.”

He agreed that was true, then he added, “There are other considerations.”

Selina raised her eyebrows. “Such as?” She was speaking in a carefully light tone of voice, the kind that she used to hide how upset or concerned she was. Bruce was perversely fond of it. Selina didn't allow herself to care about that many people.

“Catherine’s sick. Breast cancer."

She winced. "I've sorry to hear that." Cancer was practically a death sentence in the East End. "I assume you're paying for the treatment?"

Bruce rubbed at his chin. "Jason and I came to an agreement. I pay Catherine what I owe her in child support and fund her medical treatment, he comes to stay with me on weekends.” He didn’t go into detail. Selina wasn't surprised. She had no business knowing anything about his family.

Bruce had mentioned introducing her to his children once, a couple months ago when they'd just started getting serious, but she had only nodded before changing the subject. As expected, he hadn't brought it up again. And whatever vague plans he had made, Jason's arrival in his life had put them on hold. One disruption at a time was more than enough for Bruce's carefully ordered life and his overprotective impulses towards his babies.

Selina wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed a kiss underneath his ear. “You’d do that anyway,” she said.

Bruce smirked as he pulled up Black Canary’s patrol pattern for the night. She was zigzagging more, to compensate for his absence. “Yes, and any judge would decide that Jason should spend some part of the week with me.”

“So you didn’t agree to anything you weren’t planning to do in the first place, but this kid thinks he’s negotiated the perfect deal?”

Bruce snorted. No, Jason thought he had settled. He had only wanted the medical bills paid and Bruce gone. “I don’t see any reason to disabuse him. He needs to think he has some control over the situation.”

Selina snorted. “Uh-huh, and how much control are you planning on giving your little negotiator?”

He hesitated with his fingers frozen above the keyboard. “There are some things that I can’t back down on,” Bruce admitted, “but within those parameters… It’s not about _control_. It’s about Jason’s safety and his future. And Catherine’s.”

Selina's breath was hot against his neck. “I don’t think you _want_ control, but you do expect it,” she said as he switched over to monitor Huntress’s path.

He wasn’t self-deluding enough to deny that. “Yes, well.”

Bruce had been the master of his own fate since before puberty. His aunts and uncles hadn’t tried to raise him, preferring to spoil him whenever they remembered him, hoping to reap the rewards when he was older, and what authority did servants and teachers have over a boy billionaire? Even among the Gotham upper-classes no one could match his wealth and prestige, and his children were always going to be his children.

The Birds of Prey were something like equals, but it was more complicated than that. Especially when it came to Catwoman.

“So what’s the verdict?” Selina asked as he flipped through the other reports. “Is everyone doing their jobs perfectly well even without the big, bad Bat breathing down their necks?”

“Hm. Starling is favoring Newtown.”

“Because of the drive-by shooting yesterday. Which you know.”

He did know. He had agreed with Black Canary when she suggested modifying their patrol patterns to account for it. “No one’s patrolling the East End,” he said dryly. “I am a little surprised that its guardian is being so lax. The Bowery is too dangerous an area to go without a patrol this long. People could be in danger.”

The corner of her mouth curled upwards. “Is that a hint that you want me gone?” she asked.

He kept his attention on the computer. “I don’t want you gone.” He wanted the exact opposite. If it _were_ about control, Bruce would order her upstairs right now, and his children would accept their stepmother without complaint, their mothers would mind their own business, and the whole world fall into line with every member of his family exactly where they should be.

Selina pulled her cowl up. “But you do want me to go patrol the East End.”

“It’s your responsibility.”

“So it is. And there are other considerations, aren’t there?” He didn’t reply, but she _knew_. Selina knew him better than he liked. “Give me her address, and I’ll swing by to check in on the baby mama— _Catherine_ ,” she said, rolling her eyes, correcting herself before Bruce could. _Ridiculous man,_ she thought fondly.

Bruce gave her Catherine's address. Just in case.

Selina was astride her motorcycle when the grandfather clock swung open and Dick appeared at the top of the stairs. She waved a jaunty goodbye, her expression inscrutable under her mask, but she didn’t stop to talk. That was wiser than Selina knew.

Dick stared at her, his hand still raised in farewell, as she went roaring out of the Cave. “Was that Catwoman?” he asked.

“Is this your bedroom?” Bruce retorted.

Dick scoffed. “I’m sixteen years old. I don’t _need_ a bedtime.”

Bruce was getting sick and tired of having this argument. “Obviously you do,” he said coldly, “because you’re down here instead of in your bed right now.”

Dick scowled.

Sometimes, it was impossible to like his dad. He _loved_ him, more than he wanted to admit in all his sixteen-year-old glory, but sometimes Bruce would act like _this,_ and Dick would want to scream at him. But even screaming at his father wasn't satisfying because Bruce _never_ screamed back. He only got colder and more like a statue, and his voice got as hard and uncompromising as steel. It was impossible to argue with Bruce Wayne.

His friends at Gotham Academy all thought Dick was lucky to have such a young dad. "How old was he when you were born?" Craig Rockland had asked him once. "Like, eighteen? He must let you get away with _everything._ "

"Nineteen," Dick had replied, "by a month."

Sandy Cole had looked at him with an expression not unlike Lois Lane's. "How old was your mom?" she'd asked.

Mary Lloyd had been twenty-seven, and Dick had only done the math recently. Before Sandy asked him that awful question, Dick hadn't thought much about his parents' relationship. They'd been together, they'd broken up, _we'll always have Paris,_ so on and so forth. Mary had gotten together with John Grayson before Dick was a month old, and they'd had his sister Rachel when he was four. Bruce had moved on to a string of beautiful women whom Dick had never met (Jillian and Janet aside) and never wanted to.

Except in Paris, Bruce Wayne had been barely eighteen when Mary Lloyd had set her sights on him. "He was just so handsome," Mary had told her son the one time he had asked her about his father, years before Dick had moved out of a trailer and into a mansion. He wondered what she'd say if he called her tonight—or tomorrow morning, at this point—and asked, _When did you find out how old he was? Before or after I was conceived?_

His cousin Jane thought she knew. She hadn't thought Dick could overhear her, but Jane had a carrying voice. " _She_ acts all high and mighty," she'd said to Veronica Vreeland at last year's gala, gesturing to Mary with a disdainful look, "but she's no better than Janet. She was all but lying in wait for Bruce once he turned eighteen. Fortune-hunting swine."

Dick hadn't spoken in a while. “Is there something you need?” Bruce asked in a gentler tone of voice.

Dick considered admitting the truth to him— _I need to know why my mother took advantage of you. I need to know why you let woman after woman and child after child take advantage of you—_ but he only said, “No, not really.”

Bruce nodded, but he didn't believe him. He decided not to demand that Dick go upstairs to bed right now. He would wait Dick out. Eventually he would crack, and he'd tell Bruce whatever it was that was bothering him.

Dick gave in quickly. “Is he _really_ going to live with us?” he asked.

Bruce didn't know whether he found it funny or pathetic that Dick couldn't say Jason's name. “On occasion,” he answered.

“But _why?_ ”

Bruce typed a quick note for Batwoman. “Because he’s your brother, and he belongs here as much as you do,” he said.

“Not _really,_ though.” Dick was pretty sure brotherhood demanded more than a DNA test. If Tim or Cassandra were in trouble, Dick would do anything to help them, no matter the danger, but who was this Todd kid to him?

Who was this Todd kid to _Bruce?_ Who was his mother to Bruce? _Fortune hunting swine._ Bruce fell for this act time and time again, with Janet Caulfield and Jillian Maxwell, with Catherine Johnson, maybe even with Mary Lloyd. Pretty women came up to him in clubs and at parties, in the middle of League of Assassin training camps, and he went along with their bullshit _every single time._

The goddamn Batman was _gullible._

Sure enough, Bruce defended his role in this farce with an almost amused “The DNA test says otherwise.”

Jason's _face_ said otherwise. Bruce was inordinately proud of how much his children resembled him, especially the boys with their black hair and blue eyes, but Jason looked even more like him than the others did. He would have to send a picture to Jane for confirmation. She would remember more clearly what he looked like at eleven, and she wouldn’t lie to him.

She was already delighted to learn that the night she’d dragged Bruce out clubbing had resulted in a child. “You should rename him in my honor,” she had said (a suggestion he’d refused) before promising to break the news gently to her mother.

“You know what I mean,” Dick said. “I _saw_ what you dug up on him.”

“What I dug up on him,” Bruce repeated.

Dick nodded. Maybe his father would come to his senses. “I know you don’t want me in the field,” he said, passing over the fact that he knew this because they’d argued about it so many times, “but I’m ready. I’m a better fighter than any of those Titan kids, and I’ve forgotten more about computers than _Speedy_ and the rest will ever learn. Haven’t I proven that? And I’m going to prove it even more. You’ve _got_ to let me out there.”

Bruce rubbed his eyes. “I don’t, and I won’t. Do you know what really separates you from the Teen Titans, Dick?”

His son’s eyes narrowed. “No…” he said warily.

“They have _reasons_ to be in the field. They aren’t there out of some desperate need to prove themselves or to show off. No decent adult would allow a child to endanger themselves night after night without just cause. Not Green Arrow, not Wonder Woman… not Batman. I can’t stop you if you want to become a vigilante when you’re an adult, but once again, _no._ Not while you live under my roof.”

“But I can _help._ ”

“You can help when you’ve graduated from high school. If you still want to.”

Dick groaned. Bruce could at least change his arguments from time to time. "But I can _help_ now! You need me out there. I know you're going to say that you have the Birds of Prey—and _Catwoman,_ I guess—but they don't know what you need. We could be partners."

"Dick…" Bruce sighed.

That was the only argument he found difficult to contradict. They didn't have the best relationship, Bruce could admit that. He had kept his distance from Mary after the scene at the hospital between him and John Grayson, and he might have maintained that distance if not for Tony Zucco's attempt on their lives. But neither Grayson had believed Dick's account of what he had overheard, and in his desperation, he had begged the father he barely knew for help.

He hadn't known then that his father was Batman.

Bruce regretted so many of his early failures as a father, and most of those failures he had committed against his firstborn. Bruce regretted leaving the hospital that day and boarding that plane, and he regretted his distance and the sudden way he had demanded his son from Dick's mother and stepfather and sister in the aftermath of their near-death experience.

Dick regretted it too. Bruce was well aware that if Dick were to choose between living in a trailer with John Grayson or in a mansion with Bruce Wayne, he would choose John Grayson. Without hesitation.

With that thought ringing in his head, Bruce found himself saying, sharply, "You're not my partner, you're my son, and we're not having this conversation again. _Ever._ I'm tired of having the same fight with you, and it's about time you got tired of losing the same argument, don't you think?"

Dick didn't respond.

_"Richard Bruce Wayne."_

_"Fine,"_ he muttered.

Bruce grunted. "Go to bed. It's past your bedtime."

Dick spun around on his heel.

Bruce called out his name, stopping him in his tracks. “What did you mean by saying that you saw what I dug up on Jason?” His eldest son was silent. Bruce pressed him: “Richard, did you go onto this computer when I wasn’t home?”

Dick skipped lying and went straight to defiance. “So?” he asked.

Bruce swallowed a sigh. “I’ve told you that you’re not to use this computer. There is nothing on this computer that concerns you, and that includes the research I did into your brother and his mother before I met him. Whatever you read, you’ll forget. And that’s an order.”

Dick was aghast. “How can you say that? You know what’s in there.”

Bruce wondered why his children had to be so difficult.

“I do know. I also know that I’m deleting it. That was private information, and it’s fulfilled its purpose—I know exactly what we have to worry about moving forward, and I know that the only people endangered by that information are Jason and Catherine. It was and is none of your business.”

“It will be,” Dick mumbled. “People will find out.” _It will blow up in your face like it always does._

Bruce shrugged. “Maybe, but I hope not.” He had enough technical skill to hide what he needed to hide, and while he couldn't control what people said to reporters, he could hope that the tabloids sent the wrong people to the wrong places.

Dick's fists were clenched at his sides. “They’re going to find out, and they’re going to use it against us—against _you_ and Wayne Enterprises and the Wayne Foundation _._ And that wouldn’t _happen_ if you’d just left Jason in the East End where he belongs. Where he can't cause you any trouble. You don't need to place _him_ above everything else in our lives.”

“He belongs here, Dick. And that’s my final word on the subject.”

Dick sputtered inelegantly, but Bruce ignored him. Dick wanted Bruce to yell at him so he could feel like he had _won_ the conversation, and Bruce wouldn’t give him that. The last thing Dick needed right now was the feeling that he was in the right here when he most certainly was not.

He wasn’t right to want a career as a child sidekick (or to harp on about it when Bruce had already said no). He wasn’t right to use his knowledge of Batman’s secret identity to embarrass Bruce in front of his siblings. And he wasn’t right to go sneaking into Bruce’s files when he was forbidden from using any of the equipment in the Cave.

With that in mind, Bruce said, " _And_ you’re grounded. I told you not to go onto my computer, and you did. It’s not the first time you’ve done so, either. We’ll discuss the terms of your punishment in the morning. Now, go to bed. _Now._ ”

They could probably hear Dick stomping up the stairs from the second floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Edited 3/31/2019.** Same drill as the previous chapters. Tim gets more characterization, their former nanny gets an early-bird mention, Selina muses on her relationship with Bruce some, and Dick and Bruce's scene is expanded to better to explain Dick's point of view and to explain more of their history, including why the Graysons are alive in this 'verse.
> 
> I found names for some of Dick's high school friends by going on the DC Wikia page for "Gotham City High School." Sure enough, they had a list of Dick's classmates from Earth-One. I'll do more research before I write them if any of the characters show up in later chapters. Currently, I doubt they will.


	6. Redesign

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somebody asked when Jane appeared in the first chapter, so I'll put it in the notes this time: She is canonical, she's from Batman #93. It's a strange issue where she shows up at Wayne Manor and dumps her son on Bruce and Dick before taking off to visit her husband abroad. I figure she must be close to Bruce (genetically and emotionally) if she feels comfortable dropping her toddler son off unannounced, so they're first cousins.
> 
> Cousin Mina is from Detective Comics #412, but seeing as she and Bruce introduce themselves to each other in that issue, I assume they're more distantly related.

The butler came to Jason’s door at seven-thirty in the morning. “Master Jason,” he said. He’d turned the doorknob twice in vain, foiled by the lock, before giving up and knocking a rapid tattoo. “It’s time to wake up.”

“I’ve _been_ up,” Jason shouted back through the door.

Jason woke up at six like he did every morning like clockwork, but today he’d almost regretted that habit. He had nothing else to do after he took a shower in his own private bathroom and got dressed. On a normal morning, he would have made breakfast for Mom and finished up his homework, but he didn’t want to risk wandering Wayne Manor. He didn’t know what he’d find.

Probably his “brothers,” with his luck.

“It’s almost time for breakfast,” the butler continued like Jason hadn’t said a word.

“Great,” he mumbled under his breath.

Reluctantly, Jason opened the door. Mr. Pennyworth was standing in the doorway, looking exactly like he had yesterday. Jason had to wonder if he was wearing the same suit, but the butler probably had rows and rows of the same outfit hanging in his closet like he was a Scooby-Doo character.

“Did you sleep well?” Mr. Pennyworth asked.

Jason made a face. He couldn’t help it. He was over this guy pretending he was Jeeves when he’d already revealed his true opinion of Mom. “No,” he said.

Jason had woken up feeling worse than he had last night. This morning, really. He had stayed up for hours lying in that bed, straining his ears in the eerie quiet. He was used to the noise of the East End at night. He could hardly get to sleep without the sounds of the city all around him, the people yelling and laughing, the cars roaring past, the sirens and alarms going off at random.

It had almost been a relief when Bruce came by at three in the morning and tried the door— _Some noise, at last_. He’d been surprised to find it locked too, but he’d only sighed and moved on after jiggling it once. Jason didn’t know what that had been about. His theories were either too unnerving or too corny to be seriously considered.

“I am sorry to hear that, sir,” Mr. Pennyworth said. “Whatever changes needed to make your room more comfortable will be made.”

Jason snorted. “It’s fine.”

“Master Jason, if you cannot sleep—”

“I can’t sleep because it’s not my room,” Jason snapped.

He sped up, walking past the butler and down the hall to the stairs, which he took almost at a run. Mr. Pennyworth didn’t follow him, which was good. Jason didn’t know why he was pretending to care. He could get Bruce’s whole _thing_ , even if he didn’t _really_ , and he understood where Cass was coming from since her brothers were such assholes. But Mr. Pennyworth was only Bruce’s employee. He didn’t have to play nice.

Bruce was the only person in the breakfast room when Jason got there. “Good morning,” he said. He had a newspaper open in his lap like a dad on TV.

“Morning,” Jason mumbled, and he took the same chair he’d sat in last night.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I slept fine.”

Bruce didn’t look up from his newspaper. “You don’t have to settle for _fine,_ Jason. You’re spending two nights a week here for the next few months. We can change whatever you don’t like.”

Jason shrugged. He didn’t want to explain that he preferred his bed at home with its broken springs, patchwork blankets, and Mom’s soft breathing coming through the room divider regardless of how much nicer everything was here. He wasn’t _embarrassed,_ but he couldn’t say it. It was too personal to admit.

Bruce turned a page. “You’ll settle in,” he said. He sounded completely sure about that.

Jason almost asked “What if I don’t?” but he’d promised to keep an open mind.

He’d had a lot of time to think last night. He hadn’t before then. It had felt like this was all happening to him so fast, too fast for him to keep up with. It had been just him and Mom, then he’d had _a father_ , one who was nothing like Willis, then he was living with that new father and his children in his goddamn _mansion_. It’d all been too much to take in, but then he’d had hours to himself, all alone in the eerie silence of that bedroom.

Jason had known who Bruce Wayne was his whole entire life. It was hard not to, living in the East End of Gotham, where everyone depended upon the Wayne Foundation to survive. Jason couldn’t even remember the first time he’d heard about the Wayne parents and the Wayne children—how Thomas and Martha Wayne had been shot when their son was so young, how poor Mr. Wayne had to have been so miserable after seeing his parents killed right before his eyes, how it was only natural that poor Mr. Wayne doted so much on his poor children after that tragedy.

Mrs. Walker was obnoxious, but she was a good person. And she wasn’t stupid. Everything she said made sense now that Jason had met Bruce himself, and he guessed he got it. He could understand why Bruce would jump at the chance to move a new son into this old, creepy mansion and shove him into his aunt’s childhood bedroom.

He didn’t like it, and it made him uncomfortable… but _he got it._

“Can I…”

Jason trailed off when Bruce set his newspaper down, and Bruce said, gently, “Whatever it is, Jason, it’s _okay_. I’m not telling you that so I can trick you or trap you into a situation you won’t like. I mean it.”

His face burned. _“CanIpaintmyroom?”_ he asked rapidly.

The corner of Bruce’s mouth turned upwards in a crooked smile. “Of course we can paint your room. What color would you like? Your mom said you like green.”

Jason nodded, still blushing.

“I can go get some paint swatches tomorrow, and I’ll give them to your mom when I see her,” he said. Jason nodded again, still scarlet, too embarrassed to say thank you, just as the door opened to admit a stumbling, zombielike Cass.

“Good morning,” Bruce said.

She made an inhuman sound as she shuffled across the room. She practically fell into her chair, her hair smashed into disorder around her face and her eyes red-rimmed.

Dick and Tim followed Cass inside the breakfast room, receiving and answering greetings from their father. Dick was fully dressed, and he seemed awake, even though he was yawning and scowling. Tim was somehow in worse shape than Cass, and his morning greeting included the question, “Do I need to take your video games away from you again, Timothy Thomas?”

Tim muttered something indistinct, and Bruce sighed.

Mr. Pennyworth pushed in the serving cart like he had last night, only this time it was carrying pastries and eggs and oatmeal and fruit instead of pot roast. Once he’d set everything down, he disappeared again, and Jason grabbed a bagel when Bruce began passing the plates around.

There wasn’t much conversation this time around. Only _pass this_ and _pass that_ broke the silence. Cass woke up bit by bit as she ate and drank her tea, if anything Tim got more tired, and Bruce continued reading his newspaper. Once Jason met Dick’s eyes when they both looked up at the same time, and he flinched at the ferocity of Dick’s glare before dropping his gaze back to his plate.

“Is the weather any good today?” Cass asked Bruce.

“It’s supposed to be,” he said. He was in the sports section, frowning at the news that Metropolis had won last night.

“Can we go outside?”

“Who’s _we?_ ”

Cass turned to Jason. “Jason, do you want to go outside with me?” she asked him, barely holding back her eagerness. “I can give you a tour of the grounds.”

Why Jason needed a tour to see some plants he didn’t know, but it beat his other plan—sitting around and hoping he didn’t finish his book too early. He didn’t want to have to scramble for another book before it was time to go home. “Sure,” he said.

Bruce made a soft noise. “There’s a slight chance of rain, so be careful,” he said.

“We will,” Cass promised.

Cass ate like she wasn’t sure where her next meal was coming from, so she was done with breakfast way before Jason. He did hurry to keep up, but Bruce said, “It’s not a race,” and he slowed back down.

It didn’t help that Tim kept _elbowing_ him. Jason knew there was more than enough room for Tim to keep his skinny little elbows to himself, but he obviously wanted to poke his elbows at a perfect stranger for some stupid, spoiled brat reason Jason wouldn’t ever understand.

Between Dick and Tim, it was a wonder Bruce would even want another son.

“Let’s go,” Cass said as soon as Jason had the last bite in his mouth.

He stood up.

Jason supposed he had gotten a glimpse of the grounds yesterday on his way in, but the house dominated the forefront of the Wayne property so much it was impossible to see the gardens from the drive.

Not that there was much to see. “Dad said it was a long winter,” Cass said as she took him around the budding garden. Jason could tell it would be impressive in a few months, or even a few weeks, but right now? “The gardeners can only do so much with that.”

“Right,” Jason said.

Cass looked around. “I’m sorry. I thought there’d be something good,” she said.

“It’s fine. They’re just plants.”

She smiled awkwardly. “They’re _nice_ plants.”

“Sounds like,” Jason said.

Jason thought they’d go back inside after that and go their separate ways, but apparently Cass had grander ambitions. “Do you not… like it here?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Do _you?_ ”

“Yeah. It’s my home.”

Jason understood that, kind of. “But don’t you, like… prefer it at your mom’s place?”

Cass blinked. “I’ve never met my mom.”

Somehow that was the most bizarre thing Jason had ever heard, and he’d recently heard that his dad wasn’t his dad—a world-famous billionaire was. “You _haven’t?_ ” he asked.

She shook her head. “Dad said… I guess she wasn’t in a good place when I was born, and she wasn’t ready to be a mother, so Dad got full custody. He says she can get in touch with me whenever she wants, like Dick’s mom can, but she never has. Maybe she still isn’t in a good place, or maybe she…” Cass stared intensely at a tree. “I know her name, though. It’s Sandra Woosan. The _Gazette_ said… It doesn’t matter what the _Gazette_ said, it’s just some stupid tabloid. I _do_ know what her name is.”

There was a lot Jason _could_ say there, but what he _did_ say was “Huh. Okay.”

Cass was composed when she turned her head back to face him. “What about your mom?” she asked. She didn’t sound like she was upset anymore, but he didn’t think it was because she wasn’t upset. Sandra Woosan had done a number on her.

Jason was so surprised at this turn in the conversation he almost forgot his own mother’s name. “Oh… uh… her name’s Catherine. Catherine Elizabeth Todd. Johnson. Her maiden name’s Johnson.”

Cass smiled. “Not Kate or Cathy or Kitty?”

“ _Never._ ”

Willis had called Mom “Cathy” once, and she’d actually gotten angry with him. It had taken a lot for Mom to get angry with Willis. She had put up with so much from him that, in hindsight, it was a little silly that a nickname was what triggered it that time and not all the things he’d done to her. But it hadn’t seemed silly at the time.

Cass was still looking at him curiously, so Jason added, “She’s nice. She’s a good mom. Uh, she’s worked a lot of jobs, but right now she’s waitressing at the Iceberg Lounge and she’s a cashier at a grocery store.”

That confused her. Of course it confused daddy’s little princess. “I thought she had cancer,” she said.

Jason shrugged. He tried to act like it didn’t bother him. “She’s got to work, though, doesn’t she?”

It did bother him a little. He didn’t know how much money Bruce was planning on giving Mom. He had said he’d cover her medical bills and pay her child support going back to the beginning, but how much could that be? She would still have to work. And it would be impossible for her to get better with the Penguin _looming_ over her all the time.

He jabbed his thumb back at the house. “What about Tweedledee and Tweedledum?”

She turned to squint at a window. “Dick and Tim?” she asked. Like he could mean anyone else.

“Yeah, them. Where are _their_ mommies?”

Cass thought about it for a second. “Dick’s mom is with the circus somewhere, I think they’re in Houston or Austin right now. Dad and Dick probably know where exactly. And Tim’s mom lives in Keystone City.”

That was fucking bizarre. “Dick’s mom works for a circus?”

Cass nodded. “Her name’s Mary. She’s an acrobat with Haly’s Circus, and so is her husband and his brother and _his_ family. I think their daughter Rachel—Dick’s other sister—works with them too now.”

“He’s not on the circuit?” Because it was a pity he wasn’t.

Cass smiled like she _knew._ “No. I think he did a couple of performances before Dad got custody, but he can’t perform with the circus when he lives here all the time.”

“Why _does_ he live here? Kids usually get to live with their moms.” _Is Bruce lying to me?_

“Dad said it was better for Dick’s education if he lived with us and went to Gotham Academy, and Mary agreed. He’s lived with us ever since,” Cass said. “It was a while ago. We had just moved home, and Janet was pregnant with Tim when he moved in.”

“Janet is Tim’s mom?” Jason asked before he realized, “Wait, what did you mean, _you’d just moved home?_ ”

Cass kicked her foot out, barely missing a budding bush. “I mean that we'd just moved to Gotham? I was born in Dubai. We didn’t move home to Gotham until I was a few months old, and that’s when Dad met _Janet_ ,” Cass said, sounding very unhappy about Janet’s existence. “Tim’s mom. She’s the worst person you could possibly imagine.”

Jason snorted. “That checks out.”

She frowned. “Tim’s not that bad.”

He made a face. “That little shit spent breakfast elbowing me. I don’t know what his problem is, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a punch to the face.”

“He’s _eight._ ”

“When I was eight, I knew better than to elbow people. How old are you?”

“Ten.”

Jason wondered how long Bruce went in between children. If he was a year older than Cass and three years older than Tim… Dick was older than he was, but not _much._ “And all those long years ago when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, when _you_ were eight, did you go around elbowing people when they were trying to eat?”

Cass said, reluctantly, “Well, no.”

“There you go. Shithead came from Satan, that makes perfect sense.”

She didn't defend him any further. Cass’s voice was almost a whisper when she said, “She really _is_ awful. Mary is nice to me, even though she doesn’t have to be, and her husband and Rachel are nice too. Janet, though… Cousin Jane said that she’s the worst kind of gold digger, and she doesn’t treat her husband any better than she treats Dad. She’s all smiles for _Tim,_ though.”

“He’s her kid,” Jason said dismissively.

She looked doubtful. “Maybe, but… Jane said she’s only ever nice to anyone because she wants something. She wants Tim to get the business and everything, and she’s too self-centered and selfish to ever realize that Tim is the last in line to inherit. Unless Dad ever has more kids, then they'd come after Tim. But he comes after Dick and me. And you, now.”

Jason overlooked that last part. “She told you all that?” he asked, a little surprised. Adults were rarely that honest in Jason’s experience.

Cass grinned. “No, she told Cousin Mina. They didn’t know I was hiding behind a potted plant, so they talked _forever._ Cousin Jane is Dad’s favorite cousin, she knows _all_ the dirt, and Mina didn’t know _anything._ Jane told her everything she knew or she’d guessed about our mothers.” She added, in an odd voice, “She knows your mom too.”

Jason wondered where Mom could have possibly met Bruce Wayne’s Cousin Jane before deciding he didn’t want to know. “I thought Bruce was the last of the Waynes, or something,” he said.

She shook her head. “Cousin Jane isn’t a Wayne, she’s Aunt Agatha’s daughter and Senior’s wife. And Cousin Mina is a _distant_ cousin, so she doesn’t actually count. There are a couple of other distant cousins, but we’re the only ones who _count_.”

She was smiling at him. Jason wanted to say, _Not me, I’m not a Wayne,_ but Mom had said they were changing his birth certificate. That probably meant they were changing his name too.

“Jason Wayne” sounded better than “Jason Johnson,” at least. “Jason Todd” sounded best of all, but Jason could stand losing _Todd_ if it meant losing Willis too.

 

They spent the next few hours kicking around the grounds. Cass had a story for every blade of grass about how wonderful Dad was and how okay her brothers were, and Jason listened to her because he was already halfway through _The Hobbit._ That left maybe a couple of hours’ worth of reading, which wasn’t enough. He should have grabbed another book before he left the apartment, but he hadn’t even thought of that.

Mr. Pennyworth called them in for lunch, and Bruce asked, “What do you want to do this afternoon?” over sandwiches.

“I’m going to read,” Jason said. He had already spent too much time with Cass today, and he didn’t want to spend any time at all with Dick or Tim.

Bruce only nodded.

Jason went back upstairs and read the rest of _The Hobbit_ while he waited for dinner, which was some weird steak dish he’d never seen before, and his ride home. Bruce waited until dinner was over at seven o’clock to say, “I should get you back to your mother.”

Jason perked up. He practically ran up the stairs to shove his things into his backpack, and then he was standing in front of Bruce in the hallway with his earthly belongings slung over his shoulder.

Bruce said, “I guess we’re going then,” and he went to get his car keys.

They took the same car Bruce had driven yesterday. He had about twenty cars in his garage, for some reason, but even Jason could tell that the other cars were too eye-catching and too expensive to take into the East End. Even Bruce was dressed down in jeans and an old Clash t-shirt, but that wouldn’t help much. Bruce gave off this air of _expense_ that he didn’t attempt to disguise.

They were ten minutes into their hour-long drive when Bruce asked, “What shade of green were you thinking about?”

 _That_ came out of left field. “For the bedroom?” Jason asked.

“For your bedroom,” Bruce confirmed.

He hadn’t thought much about it beyond _green._ “I don’t know. Mom says walls should be pale colors.”

What followed was an interrogation forty-five minutes long about color preferences and interior design and five minutes of awkward silence scattered in between the questions. By the time they pulled up to Jason’s apartment building, he was pretty sure Bruce had not only narrowed down the paint color to three shades but that he’d mentally redesigned the entire bedroom.

“It’s fine, you know,” Jason said awkwardly as Bruce parked in the alley next to their building. “You don’t have to do anything to your house if you don’t want to. It was just an idea.”

“It’s the first request you’ve made,” Bruce replied. “And it’s an easy enough one to fulfill.”

Jason was pretty sure the first request he’d made was technically blackmail, but Bruce had gone along with that one too. Without any sign of fighting it, really. Mostly he’d critiqued Jason’s blackmail and turned it into a negotiation where he’d suggested all the terms. “It’s just a stupid bedroom,” he muttered.

“It isn’t stupid. It’s your bedroom.” Bruce reached out to ruffle Jason’s hair, and he tried not to flinch. Bruce must have noticed anyway because he yanked his hand back. “I want my house to be a home for you, Jason,” he said, more stiffly, “and that won’t ever happen if you’re not comfortable there.” He hesitated. “I want us to be a family. It might take some time, but it will happen. We’ll all… fall into place. You and me and your siblings. It just requires time and patience from us all.”

Jason’s sympathy for Bruce died. _Right._ He _totally_ believed that the only thing standing in between him and his future happiness as Dick and Tim’s most beloved brother was _time_. “I’m holding up my end of the bargain. I’m wasting my weekend at your stupid house every week,” he snapped. “You don’t have to lie to me.”

Bruce shook his head. “I’m not lying.”

Jason stared at him. If Bruce wasn’t lying, then he was a bigger idiot than Jason had suspected. “Whatever,” he said instead. He didn’t want to piss off the guy paying Mom’s medical bills.

Jason opened his car door, and he was surprised when Bruce opened his as well.

“I’ll walk you in,” he said.

Jason scoffed. “I don’t need you to hold my hand. I’m almost twelve.”

For some reason, that made Bruce smile. “It would be rude of me to come this way and not say hello to your mother,” he said. Jason didn’t believe that excuse for a second, but it wasn’t worth an argument.

Bruce stopped in his tracks outside the apartment building. “The buzzer is broken, and we don’t have keys,” he said almost angrily. Jason wondered what he had to be angry about. “Does your mom have a phone?”

Jason snorted. “No.” Honestly, who did he think Jason and Catherine were? Jason went up to the front door of the apartment building and kneed it right under the doorknob, which he twisted simultaneously. The door opened.

Jason turned around triumphantly, but Bruce didn’t look relieved or pleased or even amused. He looked horrified. “Anyone could do that,” he said.

Jason blinked. “Yeah, well. It works.”

Bruce made a strangled sound. He squeezed Jason’s shoulder as they walked into the apartment building, and not for the first time, Jason had no idea what was going on inside that guy’s head.

Bruce didn’t look around the building as they walked through like last time. He didn’t need Jason to guide him to their apartment, either. He remembered where it was perfectly, and his knock was perfect too when they got there.

There was no reply for a long time, then the door opened. But it wasn’t Mom standing there, it was Aunt Elena. “Hey, Jay,” she said softly to him while she narrowed her eyes at Bruce. “Your mom’s asleep. Do you need—?”

“I’d prefer it if Catherine were awake,” Bruce said.

“Why?” she asked sharply.

Bruce was as incredulous as she was. “I'm not going to dump my son on her doorstep and run. In any case, we have a meeting tomorrow, and I need to confirm the details with her.”

Aunt Elena clearly wasn’t impressed by that answer, but she said, “Jay, go wake up your mother.”

Jason was happy to leave the living room and the awkward standoff between his father and his mom’s best friend. He didn’t know what was going on there, and he didn’t want to know, especially not after he overheard Aunt Elena say, “Long time no see,” in the driest, most sarcastic tone of voice Jason had ever heard her use.

He pushed past the curtain dividing his side of the room from Mom’s to find her sleeping on top of her sheets, still fully dressed in her uniform. Her makeup was smeared on the pillow, and her hair was half out of her bun. She looked _awful,_ but Jason grabbed her by the shoulder anyway and shook.

She mumbled indistinctly as her eyes fluttered open.

“Mom, Bruce is here,” he said. “He needs to talk to you.”

She gave a cracking yawn. “Jason? You’re back? Did you eat dinner already?”

“Yeah. Did you?”

She shook her head. “I had a big lunch, baby, don’t worry about it.” She yawned again. “Your dad’s in the living room? Did Elena leave?”

“No, she’s still here. They’re facing off.”

Mom pulled herself to her feet, wincing as the pain shot through her side. “ _Jesus Christ,_ ” she said. “Elena’s going to eat him alive. Or they’re going to have an argument bad enough the entire building comes to take a look.”

Bruce and Aunt Elena were still smiling tightly at each other when Mom was finished fixing herself up. Their sniping hadn’t progressed past remarking on how _well_ each other looked and double-checking that he’d remembered right and Aunt Elena’s name was Elena. Mom was relieved, but Jason didn’t know why. He hadn’t known Aunt Elena had met Bruce before, and he couldn’t think of any reason why she’d dislike him—or why he’d dislike her.

“Thanks for looking after me, Lena,” Mom said. Aunt Elena pushed her arms down before she could hurt herself by going for a hug. “You probably need to be getting back, right?”

“Sarah _is_ waiting for me,” she said reluctantly, and she gave Jason and Mom goodbye kisses and Bruce a single, barely civil nod.

“Elena looks well,” Bruce said once she was gone.

“Elena always looks good,” Mom said matter-of-factly. She ran a hand through her hair, her eye blinking when she ran into a tangle she hadn’t found while scoring her brush through for five quick seconds. “Did you have a good weekend?”

Jason shrugged, and Bruce said, “It was a good first step.”

“That’s good,” Mom said after a while. “Then… next weekend…” She bit her bottom lip.

“We should get lunch tomorrow,” Bruce cut in. “You and I. We have a lot to discuss, and it will be easiest if we set aside some time for it and handle everything at once. I can pick you up here at eleven o’clock?”

Mom thought about it. “That should work,” she agreed. “I have a shift at four, but I’m sure we’ll be done before then.”

Bruce raised his eyebrows and said, "We should be," in an unconvincing tone of voice.


End file.
